UK advertising watchdog The Advertising Standards Authority has upheld a series of complaints against JeffBet featuring a promtion “BET £10 AND GET £30 FREE BET” on the homepage of its website with Terms and conditions stated “New Players Only” in small text and included a link to the full terms and conditions.

The complainant, who was not eligible for the promotion despite being a new JeffBet customer, challenged whether the ad was misleading.

ProgressPlay Ltd t/a JeffBet said that they ensured promotional ads included as much detail as possible with regards to the terms and conditions of any promotion so that consumers could make an informed decision about whether or not to participate.

They believed that, for the ad in question, there was not enough space to highlight that the promotional offer was only available to those who were new to the ProgressPlay network. Instead, they included that information in the terms and conditions, which could be found upon clicking the text “Full Terms Apply” in the ad. They provided a screenshot of those promotional terms and conditions; the ninth point stated “Any player can receive up to 1 (one) sport welcome bonus on the Progressplay Network”.

Jeffbet highlighted that further down the page, linked to from the ad, additional “Jeffbet Terms and Conditions” could be found, which detailed the definition of “Progressplay Network” as defined in the promotional terms and conditions. A further link was provided which listed ProgressPlay’s related brands.

They reiterated that the ad did not have sufficient space to detail that the welcome bet related to the whole ProgressPlay network, rather than Jeffbet itself, or to include all of the related network brands.

Because the ad gave the impression that all new Jeffbet customers were eligible for the promotion when that was not the case, the ASA concluded that the ad was misleading.