Sore loser in SMS contest in Malaysia

Telecommunication companies of course use SMS messages to organise contests, attract new subscribers and engage existing ones. Now something went wrong and became pretty expensive for one participant in Malaysia.

The woman spent around US$5,000 only resulted in her winning the second price - a motorcycle worth US$1,600. The contest rules said that the highest number of SMS send to the organising parties together with a complete slogan including personal details and an advertisement would be considered in the contest. The winners (grand prize and first price) spend far less - US$270 and US$1,100 respectively to win prices worth US$40,000.

She complaint to the Consumer Claims Tribunal and wanted her money back from the organiser.

While it is tough to meet the criteria with a text message length of only 150 letters, it is easy to blame others, and not yourself, for an expensive undertaking.

Update:

The following comment was posted:
"By the description you provide of the contest criteria - the lady's complaint is valid - she spent more money than the first prize winner, which would mean that she sent a higher volume of messages - the criteria you state includes the highest volume of messages, the slogan is secondary to the numerical criteria."

Our comment:

We are not exactly aware how the various criteria were evaluated in the final decision of the judges. However, it does actually not make sense to include the total number of SMS send into the decision since sooner or later, the costs for the SMS sent would outpace the value of the winner's price - what than happened. The article also stated that there was another contestant who actually sent more SMS, but who wasn't considered since his entries were incomplete (a problem of the limitations of SMS - 150 letters, remember?). Overall, we wanted to point out that there are people around that go over the limits to win -not considering cost and value while participating.

Thanks for the comment, anyway!