Competitions and their Prizes

Every year McDonald's runs a competition called McDonald's Monopoly.  As an incentive to buy meals from them you can get a free Monopoly leaflet marking out all the properties.  You then buy meals from MccyD's where you get stickers, 2 for a regular and 3 for a large, and 1 on a medium drink and 2 on a large drink.  The stickers are of the properties on the board and you have to collect 3 of any given colour group or 2 depending on the colours, and for doing so you win the prize for that property group.  A few years ago while at University the top prize for managing to collect Mayfair and Park lane [the highest properties on the UK edition board] you won a house.

Whenever you fly, whichever Airport you go to there seems to always be a Car parked in the middle of the Departures, this car is the top prize in a raffle, you buy tickets and if you win you get contacted.  Many shopping centres in the UK also run these Car raffles. The UK National Lottery sells scratch cards as well as their normal games.  The top prizes of these scratch cards vary.  But they can be as much as £250k or £500k. 

I think I have named enough to illustrate my point so I'll continue.  In all these competitions, I don't know anyone who has ever won the top prize, nor do I know anyone who knows someone that did.  Although my experience may be limited it is enough to cast doubt in my mind and pose the question, how do you know if these competitions are real?  I know there are several laws that protect against scams like them but how could you ever prove it?  The Data Protection Act among other things protect the competition organisers from having to give out the details of the winners publicly, so real or not you can't exactly demand they tell you who won.  Short of knowing someone who works for the competition organiser or an independent adjudicator there isn't much you can do.

In the case of the National Lottery at least an adjudicator can be called upon to verify the claims - partially owing to the fact that Camelot is partly owned by the Government.

It's interesting to note that the notion of faith in the organiser seems deeper rooted in the real world than online.  We are intensely cautious of scams and fraud online, for some reason we seem to accept that it's more likely to happen online than it is off-line - is that really the case though?  If I saw a website with a competition "Win an iPad 2" - I would be very sceptical, the likelihood of me entering that competition would be around 1% I would only ever enter it if it was run by a reputable site such as Amazon even then I would be very wary.  However walk into any shop or local business, see a promotion for a chance to win an iPad 2, the likelihood of entering would instantly rocket, and if the entrance was free, the chance of entering practically inverts to 99%. Beggars the question, are we more conscious of fraud online?

So, what have you won?  What's the biggest thing you have ever won and do you know anyone that has ever won something big?

Edit: Since writing, I have now found out I do know 1 person who has won a car from a shopping centre