The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruled in favour of an accusation against Coral Interactive after investigating a total of two complaints filed against the Gibraltar-based company.
The complaints were filed due to a press ad seen on June 10th 2016 in the Daily Telegraph. The advertisement offered customers to place bets in the match between England and Russia, with a maximum bet of £1. According to the text of the ad, players’ losing bets would have been granted with a free bet of £5, and the winnings were paid in cash. The advert stated that the special promotion was available from 8 AM.
In addition, there was a text in small print at the bottom of the advert, stating that the offer was available to new players only. There was also some additional information about the promotion, as well as reference to the full details of the offer to the company’s website.
The first one of the complainants argued that the duration of the offer was not made sufficiently clear in the advert, as they understood that the offer ran for one hour only. The other complainant claimed that the promotion was misleading as the fact that the advert did not made it clear that winnings based on the enhanced odds were paid as free bets only.
Coral Interactive, of course, responded to the accusations, explaining that the special promotion ran for an hour at 8 AM, and that releasing such offers for limited time only was common practice for bookmakers. The company also added that it believed sufficient information was provided to customers in order to properly inform them for the limited duration of the ad.
As long as the pay-outs were concerned, Coral Interactive revealed that the players who took advantage of the promotion received all their winning in cash. The operator claimed that the condition of the offer stating that the bets made on enhanced odds would be paid in free bets was made by mistake. The company also said that it had taken certain measures to prevent the terms included in their adverts were corresponding to the offers.
The Advertising Standards Authority upheld both complaints. On the first accusation, the regulatory watchdog said that the deadline of the offer had been skipped, so that the advert was misleading to customers on this point, the ASA ruled that the ad breached CAP Code rules 3.1, 8.17 and 8.17.1, concerning Misleading advertising and Significant conditions for promotions, respectively. When it comes to the second complaint, the ASA found that the advert was misleading in that aspect, too, as customers were likely to understand the text of the offer otherwise. The regulator found that the ad breached CAP Code rules 3.1 and 3.1 rules concerning Misleading advertising and Qualification, respectively.
As a result, the Advertising Standards Authority banned Coral Interactive’s ad, saying that the latter must not be displayed in its current form any more. In addition, the regulatory body recommended the Gibraltar-based company to make everything possible in order not to publish offers that could be misleading to customers.
- Author
Daniel Williams
