Borders Competitions
Introduction
Borders Competitions is fairly new online competition (founded in 2023), that is focuses on giving away car and cash prizes in their prize draws.
Key Information
- URL: borderscompetitions.co.uk
- Organiser: BORDERS COMPETITIONS LIMITED
- Type: Competitions & Prize Draws
- Prizes: Cash, Cars
Review Summary
Borders Competitions is an extremely small and lean operation, that has been able to grow in its first couple of years quite noticeably. They give out good prizes, and they do some actual good which really sets them apart from other competitions.
There are a few sticking points with their website, instant wins, and in terms of the legality of the competitions (like there almost always is, with 7days Performance being one of the biggest exceptions) – but all in all it does appear to be a very authentic competition that might be worth a punt!
Borders Competitions scores a Real Score of 7 out of 10. Due to the score, I won’t be linking to their website – as my opinion of Borders Competition is currently neutral.
If you wish to learn more about how I’ve calculated the Real Score for Borders Competitions, please see the below sections!
Real Score
There is a limited amount of information about the person who runs the competition, and it’s not instantly clear if there is an official business behind Border Competitions – but after searching with the company name, I could find BORDERS COMPETITIONS LTD that has been incorporated in 2023. And the registered name of the director matches the person listed on the site, so all good – albeit a small-looking operation (though, nothing wrong with that!).
On the About page you can find more basic promotional information, but also slightly confusing information as they claim to be a skill-based competition – but you are able to enter into the competitions without using any skill.
And on the FAQ section there are also questions about “What happens if I answer the question wrong”… Even though I could just play some tickets without answering any questions? The information looks to be a bit out of date, and they’ve just probably stopped doing this.
Finally, I wish they were a bit more clear about the odds of the competitions. If you look at the prizes, you can only see a percentage of how much of the tickets are sold:
You are only able to see the amount of tickets from within the competition itself, and this is under the button you buy tickets with – which isn’t great for transparency and usually is by design to make people miss the actual odds.
What do I mean by that? Well, if you are using a desktop device, you might be able to see the odds before you enter or the total amount of tickets. However, if you are using a mobile device, the amount of available tickets gets hidden completely out of view – and most people wouldn’t be able to find this before entering unless they scroll past all the content (and most importantly past the big blue “PARTICIPATE NOW” button:
There are lots of pictures of the previous winners on the winner’s page – although it’s all done in a very simple format and you can’t for example check ticket numbers or anything else. (Also, how common of a name is Hannah Hunter exactly?)
The £125k win obviously caught my eye – so I thought I’d check their Facebook Live Draw and I was able to find the said live draw where Hannah won the £125k – so even though there were no ticket numbers or any information of the draw available on the website, they seem to check out:
The draws are being done live on Facebook while filming with a phone which is very basic, but at the same time it brings a nice layer of authenticity and also makes it harder to fake things – as if you were just sharing a part of your screen that’s cropped like some other competitions do.
In the example of the £125k draw – you can see the long list of names that have entered, and that they are actually using the random number generator, as you can see the whole device being used to do the draw:
In a way this is not that professional – but I prefer this to an overly-polished draw that’s potentially easier to fake as well. No fancy business going on here.
However, it’s not clear how the auto draws are being done or the instant wins. From looking at the competition website, it looks like this is one of these very basic WordPress competition templates that I’m not personally keen on; as some of them do give the person running the instant wins control over how, who and when a prize is won. Which does create some concerns or potential for foul play.
Much like other competitions reviewed on this site, Borders Competition offers a postal entry as the free alternative, so that one could consider the site to be compliant with the Gambling Commissions guidelines.
The ‘Free postal entry’ isn’t hidden, like on some other sites which is nice:
However, as with a number of very poorly reviewed competitions on this site – they do not acknowledge your free entries at all… So as discussed in my blog post; I wouldn’t bother sending a free entry as they are unlikely to be counted or included anyway.
As the competition was founded in 2023, there isn’t much of a track record to speak of. However, it looks like they are doing well and have been able to award big prizes, and currently have a few competitions up that have good prizes as well. So, as long as they don’t bite more than they can chew in terms of how big they go with the prizes or how much money they try to make and increase this as they grow – Border Competitions still looks like a very lean and sensibly managed operation, even if it doesn’t have a long track record.
Borders Competitions does have decent prizes, and you are always able to enter for a chance to win what I consider to be a life-changing amount of money.
And if we take the Audi RS6 as an example, the draw isn’t just for that – and it looks like there are still a good number of cash prizes to be won instantly in the same draw (these instant win cash prizes alone are better than most draws Gaming Giveaways does for example!). Nice!
The odds are decent, as far as the competitions go. They appear to be well-balanced in relation to what the tickets cost, and to what the total amount of prizes is (and the amount of money they are also making).
Considering that you are able to win £75,000 for £1.99 or £25,000 for 5p at the writing this review – the value proposition of Border Competitions is very good.
For a small competition that’s been running a bit less than two years; they’ve managed to donate over £25k to good causes already – which is extremely respectable. Kudos!
And at the time I started to write this review originally in late 2024, their main prize had a text mentioning that they will be donating £5k of the draw proceedings to Andy’s Man Club. So, they are not just randomly donating here and there, but also pledging to donate a certain sum for a specific cause.
You are able to see the donations they have on their “Our Impact” page. Granted, majority of the donations are using just a picture, but a good portion of them have the owner Jack posing with the charity (or something / someone else) in question, so there’s no need to question the legitimacy of the donations.
After a little break from writing this review – I noticed that Borders Competitions has since doubled the amount of donations (£52,000 as of Feb 2025) in approximately 5 months!
Granted, the format of the website and the proof of the donations is still very similar, and sometimes not more than just a bit of text on the “Our Impact” page. However, I have no doubts that all the donations are real on the website as Borders Competitions / Jack’s managed to get a good amount of pictures about the said donations and in a way that would be extremely difficult to fake.
Additionally, while there are several other competitions and giveaways that don’t tell exactly how much they’ve given away – but if we do a comparison to one of the big ones that shows the amount… Let’s say with Dream Car Giveaways: I think anyone would agree that Border Competitions does come out on top easily.
At the time of writing this, Dream Car Giveaways has given just barely over twice the amount since 2018. And they are one of the biggest competition sites in the country, that has been running for a half a decade longer than Border Competitions has!
Note: Obviously, every penny to a good cause is still to a good cause, so I’m not trying to slag Dream Car Giveaways off. Rather, trying to hammer the point home that Borders Competition is actually doing this part really well.
For the bonus point I’d like to focus on the philanthropy of Border Competitions (Personal comment: It’s for once nice to be able to focus on a positive point for once that sticks out! As usually I feel like I’m just pointing out negative things in my bonus point like with Good Life Plus, Rev Comps, Dream Car Giveaways, Gaming Giveaways, WinWink, etc…)
Back to the point: For such a small and lean operation, they’ve managed to raise a disproportionately large amount of money to good causes. And these are all actual good causes. So, well done! The way I see it; Border Competitions puts pretty much every other competition site to shame by what Jack’s managed to do alone.
There is only one sticking point with the donations… And that is to show more of the donations they’ve done. Borders competitions show this large number for the amount donated, and they do mention on the website that not all of the donations done are listed on that page. My question is: Why not? Considering that it looks like a lot of these donations can be added to the site with very minimal effort as there are plenty without any pictures attached to them already.
Notes
For such an ‘unpolished’ competition, I was pleasantly surprised when looking into Borders Competitions. While I did find a few sticking points, these are nothing that they can’t sort out or should matter that much. Also, it quite nice not to have to tear everything into bits, as I was pleasantly surprised for the most parts.
As far as competitions and recommending them goes, they could just sort out a few issues with their process, website and how the odds are shown – and then the score they receive should hit the ‘Recommended’.
And as a final note: I always hate the kind of imagery that I think is ‘cheap AI-generated garbage’ as is common with several other competitions – the kind you can see in the featured image of this review as an example. However, I think we can forgive them (or should I say him) for it – as this competition is operated by 1-2 people from the looks of it.
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