Player Protection & Fair Draw Code

Competitions are open only to adults aged 18 or over who are resident in Great Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales) and meet the published eligibility requirements.

Competitions are prize draws. Paid online entries and free postal entries have the same chance of winning.

A free postal entry route is available for every competition until 7:30 PM on its closing date, unless the competition page says otherwise. No purchase is required to enter by post.

Send one individual postcard or letter, carrying its own valid First Class or Second Class postage, to Crown & Eagle Competitions, 6 East Grove Road, Newport, NP19 9QG. The whole entry must be handwritten and must clearly state your full name, postcode, date of birth, contact email, the exact three-character competition code shown on the competition tile, and this statement: “I agree to the Crown & Eagle Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.”

You can have up to 10 postal entries entered in each competition, and each entry must be sent separately under its own stamp. We count entries by the email address on them. Any further entries from the same email address for the same competition are void.

Handwriting is required by default to prevent automated entry abuse. If a recognised disability or physical condition makes handwriting impossible, email [email protected] before posting. We record the adjustment against the email address only, without requesting diagnosis or medical details. Once recorded, typed or printed physical entries from that email address are permitted until you ask us to remove the adjustment or the related account is deleted. All other rules still apply.

Valid entries
An entry is valid only if it meets every requirement above. Bulk entries, multiple entries in one envelope, incomplete or illegible entries, entries without the statement, and entries from anyone under 18 or anyone not resident in Great Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales) will be rejected. If an account already exists for the supplied email address, the entrant's full name and date of birth must match that account. A mismatch will be rejected. An entry linked to an account that is restricted, or in a time-out or self-exclusion period, will also be rejected. If no account exists for the supplied email address, an internal guest record will be created. An invalid entry is rejected whenever it arrives.

Tickets kept for postal entries
For every competition, 25% of the total number of tickets, rounded down to a whole ticket, is kept for free postal entries. We call this the postal reserve. For example, a competition with 250 tickets keeps 62 tickets for postal entries, and a competition with 3 tickets or fewer has no postal reserve. Online sales are limited to the other tickets. When they have all been allocated, or are held for payments still being processed, the competition page shows that online tickets have sold out, and the competition stays open for postal entries until its closing date.

Valid postal entries are allocated tickets from the postal reserve. Once the reserve is used up, they can also be allocated any tickets still available online.

72 hours before the advertised closing date and time, any reserve tickets not allocated to postal entries are released and go on sale online. After that, online and postal entries use the same remaining tickets, so the competition can sell out before its closing date.

Closing date for postal entries
We judge a postal entry by the date and time we record it, not by its postmark or the date it was posted. We record post on the evening it arrives. If we can't, we record it at our next session, and entries are recorded in the order we open them. An entry must be recorded by the advertised closing date and time of the competition it names. Competitions close at 7:30 PM on their closing date, unless the competition page says otherwise.

A valid entry that we record by the closing date is allocated one random remaining ticket in that competition. If the only remaining tickets are held for payments still being processed, the entry waits in order of the date and time we recorded it. When a held ticket is released, it is allocated to the first waiting entry. If every held ticket is paid for, the competition has sold out and the waiting entries are void, as described below. A valid entry that we record after the closing date is void: it is not entered into any draw, and we securely shred it. A void entry is turned away because of when it was recorded, because no ticket was left, or because the entry limit was reached, which is separate from an entry rejected as invalid.

We confirm each entered postal entry by email when we record it. We don't email about void entries at the time. Instead, after the competition is drawn, we send one email to each entrant saying how many of their entries were not entered and why, where the email address on the entries is legible.

Postal entries do not reserve tickets while in transit. We are not responsible for postal delays. Processed postal entries have the same chance of winning as paid entries.

If the competition sells out
A competition sells out only when every ticket is allocated through paid or free online entries, or processed postal entries, not while tickets are held for payments still being processed. A valid postal entry that we record after a competition has sold out is void: it is not allocated a ticket and is not entered into this draw or any other draw, and there is no consolation or secondary draw for void entries. We tell the entrant in the summary email sent after the draw, and securely shred the entry. To give your entry the best chance of being allocated a ticket, post it early.

Accepted physical correspondence is stored by the competition code to which the ticket was allocated and securely shredded 60 days after the final accepted winner is found, unless a legal hold requires longer retention. Rejected and void correspondence is counted by reason and securely shredded promptly. We keep no personal details from a rejected entry. From a void entry, we keep only the email address, to send the summary email after the draw, and then delete it.

Card payments are processed by a third-party, PCI-DSS compliant payment processor, whether by redirect to its own secure payment page or via payment fields it hosts within our checkout.

Payment authorisation alone does not issue tickets. Tickets are created only after a confirmed-payment notification, and they are withdrawn if the payment later fails, is cancelled, reversed, refunded, disputed or charged back.

When you start a card payment, the tickets you chose are held for you while the payment is processed. If you open the secure payment page but do not complete the payment, the hold ends within about an hour: the tickets are released, and the unfinished payment no longer counts towards the monthly card payment cap.

Card payments are capped at GBP 250 for each person in each calendar month, counted from midnight at the start of the 1st (UK time). Completed card payments and card payments still being processed count towards the cap. Failed payments do not. Only money paid by card counts: Sovereigns do not count. A refund does not reduce the month's total. If a payment would take you over the cap, checkout tells you how much you can still pay by card that month. The most tickets you can select in one order is set by what is left of the cap, using the order value after ticket discounts and before any Sovereigns.

You can choose a daily or a monthly spending limit. A monthly limit controls your total spend across the calendar month. New accounts start with a daily limit of GBP 20.

A lower limit applies straight away. Any change that raises the amount you can spend in a day or in a month takes effect only after 24 hours, and your current limit applies until then. This includes switching between a daily and a monthly limit where the new setting allows more in either period, and removing your limit. If you set a lower limit while an increase is waiting, the lower limit applies straight away and the waiting increase is cancelled.

No setting allows more than GBP 250 in a calendar month. With no limit set, the monthly card payment cap of GBP 250 still applies.

Customers can apply a 1-day, 7-day, 30-day or custom time-out. Customers may also request a longer self-exclusion period, including a period of at least 6 months, by contacting [email protected].

During a time-out or self-exclusion, customers may still log in and view account, legal and support pages, but cannot enter competitions.

Every ticket is a separate, individually recorded entry: a purchase of more than one ticket, and every approved free postal entry, each receive their own entry record with its own equal chance of winning. No entry is weighted, ranked or given priority over any other.

Winners are selected using PHP's random_int function, a cryptographically secure random number generator (CSPRNG). At the point of the draw, every eligible entry for that competition is placed into a fixed, ordered list, and random_int generates a single random position within that list; the entry at that position wins. Prizes are awarded strictly in accordance with the laws of chance: the selection is entirely automated and no manual choice, weighting or ranking is applied at any stage.

When we approve the winner, we email every other entrant, including postal entrants, to tell them the result. If an email fails, we keep a record so we can send it again.

When we confirm that the prize has been paid or delivered, a permanent record of the competition, the draw details and the winner's initials appears on the public Recent Winners page.

Paid entries, free online entries and approved free postal entries have an equal, ticket-for-ticket chance of winning.

The public draw audit on the Recent Winners page shows the draw ID, the date, the random position chosen, the total number of valid entries, the winning ticket number, the eligible entries hash and the randomisation method.

We keep administrative audit logs and operational records to support security, fraud prevention, dispute resolution, responsible play, system administration and legal compliance.

Customers can submit complaints using the Complaints page or contact [email protected].

The player protection, transparency and free entry route measures on this page have been developed with regard to the UK Government's Voluntary Code of Good Practice for Prize Draw Operators, published by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). The Code sets out expectations for prize draw and competition operators on player protection, transparency and accountability.

You can read the full Code on the UK Government website: Voluntary Code of Good Practice for Prize Draw Operators.

Competitions are not instant-win games. We don't pressure anyone to spend, and you should only enter for entertainment and with money you can afford.

We keep administrative audit logs and operational records to support security, fraud prevention, dispute resolution, responsible play, system administration and legal compliance. These records include payment totals, refunds, historical quiz statistics, blocked Player Protection limit attempts, suspended-account attempts and draw audit records.