Londoner creates his own lottery

Chris Holbrook.

A Londoner has created a free online lottery that has given away more than £25,000 in three years, reports the London Evening Standard.

Chris Holbrook says his site is “raising two fingers at the gambling industry”.

Mr Holbrook, from Finsbury Park, London, was a web developer, when he heard a BBC Radio 4 report about the NHS “postcode lottery”. He decided to create a Free Postcode Lottery using advertising to fund it.

He mulled the idea over for three years before deciding to create it.

“I realised I’d become that person who would sit in the pub talking about their ideas, not actually doing them,” he says. “So I spent a weekend coding a website and built it.”

The site was launched in 2011, and then, players entered their details to check into the site to be in with a chance of winning a daily jackpot of £10. However, the site has grown significantly, and now has 35,000 players, creating a daily jackpot of £50.

He says that, on average, every three days a registered postcode is drawn. This means that there is normally a rollover, so players normally pocket £150.

Until January, the website only gave him enough for “beer money”. Now, however, with its growing popularity, he will earn between £50,000 and £100,000 in 2014.

This isn’t enough to make him quit his day job, though. He is continuing to work as a freelance web designer, as he is expecting a child in December with his wife.

Not everyone has taken to his lottery.

“People get suspicious about my motives”, he says. “Someone accused me of being a front for MI5, and everyone thinks I make loads of money on the side by selling people’s details on, but I don’t. I only ask for an email address and postcode … if I started asking more questions to sell the data, it wouldn’t work.

“The original idea wasn’t to make people happy, it was to see if my website would work, but I get an added bonus because of the amazing feedback I receive — one winner who won £400 recently gave half to his friend who reminded him to check the site. Another who won £40 a few years ago emailed to say she had been really depressed and had not left her house for weeks but the prize had helped perk her up and got her out. The lottery is almost accidentally making people happy.”

As the website is free to enter, it is not regulated by the Gambling Commission.

“It’s just random money-giving, gambling,” he says. “I’ve never bought a lottery ticket in my life — this whole idea is two fingers up to the gambling industry.”