Check any draw yourself
Every draw is run by a random number, and we publish it. Drop it in below and your own browser works out who should have won, on the spot. If it lands on the winner we announced, the draw was real - and you never had to take our word for it.
How a winner is chosen
When a competition closes, we gather every ticket whose entry answered the skill question correctly. Paid and free postal entries sit in this pool on identical terms - one ticket is one slot, with the same odds. Refunded, cancelled and demo entries are removed so they can never win.
We then create a fresh random number for the draw. That number, and only that number, picks the winning ticket, and it does it in a way that gives every ticket exactly the same chance. Because the number decides everything, the result is locked in: the same number always picks the same winner, and change one character of it and a completely different ticket wins.
Because that number fixes the result, publishing it gives nothing away - it just lets you check our working. We record the number, how many tickets were in the draw, and the winning ticket the moment the draw runs, and show them here and on each competition's page. The checker above does the exact same sums on your own device, and nothing is sent back to us.
Winner privacy: we publish only a first name and the local area they live in, worked out from the first part of their postcode. Winners can switch this off in their account, in which case the draw shows “Anonymous winner”. Surnames, email addresses, full postcodes and our internal operator records are never shown publicly.