Win the Lottery, for Free!

There’s nothing to raise the spirits quite like winning something – well, maybe apart from the other kind of spirits, but day drinking is frowned upon. One of the little thrills of my day is checking all my free lotteries to see if I’ve boosted my finances by simple expedient of having the right birthday or postcode. Usually I haven’t, but a little bit of hope goes a long way.

All of the following lotteries are free of charge and very easy to sign up for; some of them don’t even need a password! Like most free things, you pay in time instead of money, but it’s only 2/3 minutes a day. You have to check them daily, otherwise you will miss out on your prize, which would be disappointing, to say the least, but they allow you to set up reminder emails to reduce your chances of forgetting.

Most of them are UK-based. Free National Lotto and the Freemoji lottery, the last two in the post, seem to be international, so you can scroll straight down to them if you like. If you’re from another country and know of any equivalents, maybe you could share the love by writing about them for Vocal!

A few of these links earn me a little site bonus if you join. Those are marked with * and an explanation of what I earn is in the text. Rest assured, I won't be getting rich from these links!

Win a Dinner*

Starting with the first one I ever won anything on! Win A Dinner offers prizes of gift cards or PayPal cash to at least 4 winners drawn every day. The gift cards are usually £25 or £30, and the PayPal prize is usually £20 but sometimes stretches to £25. I suppose it depends on how their advertising revenues are doing. If you’re truly a generous soul, you can donate it to the charity FareShare instead, in which case Win A Dinner will bump it up to £40.

Pre-Covid, the gift cards were all for restaurants, but they have now branched out to offering supermarket and takeaway vouchers. The current choices are: Sainsbury’s, Just Eat, Wagamama, Great British Pub and Pizza Express.

The draw is at 4PM every day, and any unclaimed prizes roll over to the next day, so there are usually more winners than the minimum of four. If, for example, four winners were drawn but only two claimed, six people would win a dinner the next day. There is no way to claim a prize if you’ve missed it so don’t forget to check!

When I won on Win A Dinner, I chose the PayPal option because I was totally skint. It arrived very quickly – within 48 hours if I recall correctly. Weirdly, the link above is a referral link, but there is no reward - they just count my referrals in case they get around to adding rewards in the future!

My Happy Street

This one uses your street name as your entry to the draw. There are seven streets drawn each day at 12pm, with a minimum prize of £5. The main draw and draw extra roll over, so they will keep growing by £5 each day until someone claims. For some reason people seem to claim quite rarely on My Happy Street, with the consequence that the main draw and draw extra are nearly always much more than £5; right now the main draw is at £110 and the draw extra is at £30. If more than one person is registered on one street and claims, the prize will be shared.

The only downside is that payout is seriously slow. One shouldn’t complain about free money and I wouldn’t, but people get antsy about it so I thought I’d warn you in advance! When I won on My Happy Street it was £75 and it took about three weeks to arrive in my PayPal account.

If you join through the link above, they will make a charity donation to COVID-related causes. I don’t know how much it is, but apparently they have raised over £10,000 so far – not to be sniffed at!

Pick My Postcode*

This is easily the most popular free lottery in the UK, and has a dazzling array of draws.

The main draw, video draw, survey draw and bonus draws (more on them later) are done at 12 midday. The main draw is currently a £200 prize which rolls over if not claimed. The video draw and the survey draw are each £50, and roll over as well. If more than one person claims, the prize is shared.

The stackpot is drawn twice a day at 9AM and 9PM, and at least ten postcodes can claim a £10 prize. Unlike the main draws, it’s first come first served, so if more than one person is registered at your postcode you might want to check at 9.03. 😁 Likewise, the hundred-pound mini draw, which appears at 6PM and can only be claimed until 2am, can only be claimed by one person.

Then there’s the bonus. Every time you check the main three draws, you earn 1p for your bonus. There are also offers and surveys dotted around the site that allow you to add bigger amounts to your pot. When you reach £5, £10 and £20 you are added to the bonus draws for the same amount. If you win most draws, you’ll receive your bonus on top of the prize.

I’ve never won on Pick My Postcode, so I can’t personally testify, but it seems from winners’ comments on Facebook that their payout times are very fast.

Be aware that if you join through my referral link above, you’ll add a whopping 20p to my bonus, so think carefully about whether you want to add to my potential future enrichment like that.

Lottery.co.uk Free Lottery

As well as daily £500 free lottery - excluding rollovers, that's the biggest potential prize on this list - this website carries results for every National Lotto game in the UK, plus statistics on all the draws that have ever happened! Your entry is six numbers, which you can choose yourself or have drawn at random. You have to match all six to win.

You have to manually enter the free lottery every day, and have until two hours before the draw takes place to do so. The draw takes place at 7.30pm each evening, so make sure to enter before 5.30pm. If you win, you have two days to contact the team to confirm your prize. They pay out retro-style, by cheque in the post. I've never won on this one, so I can't say how quick it is, but it should be fairly secure, as it's sent registered post.

There's also a weekly draw for £10,000, which you can only enter if you have entered the daily draw at least three times in a week.

Freemoji Lottery

Finally, an international free lottery! The amount of the prizes here is in USD, so a little smaller than the UK-based ones. There are six draws – one main draw that rolls over, often into the hundreds, and five fivers draws that always remain at $5.

Freemoji Lottery is, you might have guessed, based on emoji. You choose a set of five emoji, which you can change at any time, and simply check to see if you’ve won each day. Only combinations which are actually entered can be drawn, so someone will definitely win.

Free National Lotto*

Despite its name, the Free National Lotto is available to people around the world. You choose five numbers and the main draw is at midday GMT each day. Its prize is £5 - that's $6.85 US at the time of writing. There is a guaranteed winner as, like Freemoji lottery, only combinations actually chosen by players are drawn. It rolls over if the winner doesn't spot it, but unlike many of the others, it is usually claimed. Also, if there is more than one winner, the prize can be shared, meaning that it could end up being pretty titchy! You can avoid this easily by checking your numbers on the account page to make sure you have unique ones.

A much bigger prize is available with the 5-ball draw that happens twice a week. I don't know why it's called that; the main draw has five balls too, but I guess they didn't have the energy to come up with an exciting name that day! The prize is £2000 - not bad for opening a webpage! - but any combination of numbers can be drawn, so there often isn't a winner.

There's also a £5 survey draw, which as its name suggests, the results of can only be accessed by completing a survey. I often don't bother to do this, because I am lazy; but one good thing about it is that surveys done add to your 'bonus balls', which increase your prize if you ever win. You automatically earn one bonus ball every time you check the daily draw, and they have an exchange rate of 1 BB - 0.01. Surveys earn you a bonus of around 25BB, but of course there's a chance you'll never actually get that. If you're interested in making money from doing surveys, you'd be better off joining a site where you can get paid at any time, like Qmee*.

If you join Free National Lotto through the link above, you'll add 25 balls to my bonus, and if you join Qmee - a site that offers small payments for surveys and clicking on spondered links - you'll earn me and yourself 50p each. Qmee operates in the UK, USA, Australia and Canada.

Good luck! If you enjoyed this article, please like it on Vocal!

Parts of this article were previously published on my blog, The Spinstress, at: https://thespinstressblog.wordpress.com/2021/04/06/a-z-challenge-excitement/

If you enjoyed this article, I'm sure you'd like the rest of my blog!