The National Lotteries Board (NLB) will no longer take steps against cellular operator Vodacom for what the regulator considered to be an illegal lottery.
Sershan Naidoo, spokesman for the NLB, has confirmed that since Vodacom halted its controversial "100 cars in 100 days" competition, the NLB would leave the matter be.
This is despite the NLB landing a recent legal victory by successfully prosecuting First National Bank (FNB) for running a similar competition that the NLB also believed to be an illegal lottery in disguise.
Last week, the Supreme Court of Appeals ruled in the NLB's favour that money deposited into FNB's Million-a-Month (MAM) accounts effectively constituted a wager and that all the bank's MAM accounts had to be closed.
Naidoo was overseas at the time and was, therefore, not able to comment on the matter until now.
He says, while the NLB is satisfied with the ruling, Vodacom will not be taken to court in the wake of it.
"Our role as regulator is to get them [those accused of running illegal lotteries] to stop," he explains. "We ordered Vodacom to stop and they did, so we will not take them to court or take any further steps against them."
Naidoo says anyone who feels aggrieved by the Vodacom competition, and wants compensation for losses incurred, would have to take recourse by consulting their own legal council.
Under the "100 cars in 100 days" competition, Vodacom charged R10 per SMS entry into a competition where people could win one of 100 BMWs in the space of 100 days. Vodacom users were encouraged to enter more than once and there was a weekly draw for whomever had the most entries for that week.
Subscribers complained after numerous people ran up bills of hundreds of thousands of rands in a bid to win a car.
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