Enough stories about people losing lottery tickets ran in U.K. newspapers for readers to notice odd repetitions, not least the same guy appearing in them under different names. Moreover, you can still claim winnings without a ticket in Britain, so the stories didn't make much sense. The Press Gazette started making phone calls, could not find living persons under those identities, and was then threatened by a PR firm involved with the articles—which all contain links to a gambling site.
PR agency Signal the News threatened Press Gazette with an injunction if we published even a partial screenshot of stories arising from its work which have appeared in the Daily Mail, Metro, Daily Mirror, Daily Express, The Sun and elsewhere.
The warning notes: "We will also notify your infrastructure providers, Fastly, Inc. and Pantheon, requiring immediate removal of the infringing content.
"Please be advised that publishing our images after receiving this notice removes any defence of innocent infringement and significantly increases your liability under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988."
The story leaves little room for doubt. The implication is that these newspapers aren't even getting paid to run this stuff, though the PR agency is surely getting paid to send it to them.
A third story featured Aberdeen man Liam Carter who allegedly discovered a lottery ticket in a drawer after his mother's death and which ran in dozens of outlets, including Aberdeen Live, Lancashire Eveing Post, Daily Record, the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, Metro and Daily Express. In each case, experts from the gambling site … offered advice on what to do in such cases (and the business received links in the articles, which are valuable for SEO purposes).
Relevant services are indeed offered at a London-based agency website with the name cited by Press Gazette. It promises that "we never compromise on authenticity," a claim found alongside a testament to their "PASION FOR QUALITY."[sic] The company's listed address is a virtual office, it identifies elsewhere as a company based in Romania, and the contact email domain leads to the welcome page of an unconfigured Apache web server. All this is, at least, a step up from Max Clifford.
