Just received a flyer for TLAC in a kitchen equipment mail order cataloque and fortunately, being suspicious, read the small print. This one was a phone call @ £1.50 per min for 6 mins plus £9.95 ‘insurance and delivery’ for electrical items, including the 10,000 MP3 players on offer. I’d ‘definitely won one of the prizes listed’ which was obviously going to be an MP3 player. So if we assume that the cost to them of the MP3 players is the £9.95 they are charging for ‘insurance’ (probably it’s less) that they have to pay the mail order company for placing the flyer (say £5K), that true 2nd class postage for the player is £1, if they had 100% takeup they’d make somewhere around £75K! Not bad! Even with only 25% takeup that would amount to around £19-20K and so still worth doing!

I then did a google search for information about this mob, came across you guys and was so taken by the sheer volume of comment that, though I normally don’t do so, on this occasion I would write something.

Unfortunately I suspect there’s little anyone can do as they are, technically, delivering what they claim in the flyer. The issue is one of morality; it’s up to us, the consumer, to deduce that, whilst free lunches do sometimes come around, you’ve generally first taken an action to expect some sort of reward (Scoop 6, Prizedraw, Lotto etc.). Anything else is probably just wishful thinking with a well concealed price tag!

By the way, they seem to like this code 507705 – mine was the same!