Zavvi tells customers: You've won VIP tickets to Champions League final! And you've won tickets, and you've won tickets, and you, and... Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur are off to Madrid for the Champions League final after emphatic wins against Barcelona and Ajax – so of course devotees were ecstatic to find they had won all-expenses-paid VIP tickets to the footie match courtesy of etailer Zavvi. However, that joy soon turned to ash in their mouths when it …
On another plus side - I'm looking forward to a new "Who, Me?" story that I hope will be written once the current PR shit storm has calmed down.
Someone we'll call "Ben" was working for an unnamed online retailer that many had considered long defunct. He'd been tasked with writing a script that sent a "Winner notification" email to the list of addresses in database table.CompWin but actually sent it to the list of addresses in table.CompIn (i.e. those who were entered into the competition). Since this was a relatively straight forward task he didn't see any need to debug it on a test database first and, well, ...
"Is there anything in their T&Cs that says they can't be held to this?"
Certainly if you haven't entered the competition, you don't get to claim it, because there's no contract to breach. Saying "have a free car", you say "yes please", and I say "I've changed my mind" is not grounds to sue for breach of contract, because there's no contract.
They have, however, offered something. If there were no conditions attached allowing them to withdraw it I'd have thought that that would conclude an agreement. It wouldn't be a contract on account of lack of a consideration. Or maybe it would as these days the value of personal data provided to them might be a consideration in itself.
"If there were no conditions attached allowing them to withdraw it I'd have thought that that would conclude an agreement. "
Under UK tort law, promising you free stuff does not mean I have to follow through on it. Case law is very settled on this.
The only exception is with promissory estoppel. If people immediately booked non-refundable flights and accommodation before getting the e-mail saying it was an error, they could claim compensation for actual loss, and at this juncture it might be cheaper for Zavvi to purchase tickets and just hand them over.
But the claimant needs a 'reasonable' expectation that the promise is also real. If I say I'll give you a million pounds if you are right about some trivia, and then you are, you are not entitled to it. If you quit your job in the expectation of receiving the million pounds, that would be when promissory estoppel would come into play, but in this case unless I were a billionaire and frequently handed out millions on bets, you would not have any reasonable expectation that I would in fact give you a million.
Usual IANAL applies here. This information is for entertainment purposes only etc.
"Or maybe it would as these days the value of personal data provided to them might be a consideration in itself."
I didn't notice this bit you slipped in at the end. That's a very good question. I think GDPR would bear on such a question, because it explicitly prevents you from using the data in a way that would give it value, unless the party consents. So if consent for using the data for marketing purposes was not asked for at the time of the competition, then it would be hard to assign a monetary value to that data, as it cannot be used.
Even then, I believe that a competition like this is classed as either a prize competition or a free draw anyway (depending on what they had to do when entering), and so does not form a standard contract. The message saying that you have won is a 'mistake', clearly, as there should be only one winner, so despite being told you have won, you haven't.
"it appears #Zavvi have booked out the entire Wanda Metropolitano Stadium for it’s loyal customers"
... not just loyal customers - I got this (I assume it was this as I binned it on basis of message title) and most of my previous emails from Zavvi have been along the lines of "we've not seen you for a long time - how about a 10%-off offer" ... only problem is last time I ordered somthing from them (several years ago) I got a "sorry, this isn't in stock at the moment, we'll get back to you as soon as it comes in again" email followed by, a few weeks later by the inevitable "sorry, we're not able to get this anymore so we are cancelling your order".
...of a time when I was a kiddie in the 1960s and on holiday with parents at some UK coastal holiday resort (time has erased the memory of exactly which one).
Parents decided to take us all to see the Des O'Connor show on the local pier. On entry everyone was given a copy of the programme (this was back in the days when they didn't cost extra!) and hidden inside the programme was a bingo card. At a point during the show Des said that they were going to try something different for this show and that everyone should pull out their bingo card. As we did so a smiling scantily-clad young lady wheeled on a flash new bicycle, which we assumed would be the prize. Then Des started calling out the numbers and we started crossing off our numbers. We were doing extremely well and had all all the numbers crossed off apart from one. Then Des called out the next number - and it was our missing one!
So, my entire family jumped up and shouted "House!"
However, so did everyone else in the audience. Yep, all the bingo cards were (deliberately) the same! Des creased up with laughter for several minutes and then said it was one of the funniest moments he'd ever experienced, especially the initially surprised and perplexed looks on the audience's faces until we'd figured out the joke.
The email said that you had to confirm that you qualified.
Which rules out everyone who didn't buy something with Mastercard during the qualifying period.
There must still be some customers who qualified for the draw and who will be justifiably agrieved.
I just thought it was phishing .
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