xio Limited, operators of the World Lottery Club betting site have been censured by the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) over unclear advertising of its lottery betting games.

An advertisement seen on Facebook newsfeeds on the 14 June 2017 by World Lottery Club stated: “How about never working again or starting an empire! Spend it your own way, you’d be one of the UK’s wealthiest lottery winners."

This text was accompanied by a red bar advertisement labelled “BREAKING NEWS”. Further text stated “BREAKING: UK’s BIGGEST lottery draw of £349M set for TONIGHT”, providing a link to an article describing the lottery betting site.

A complainant referred the advertisement to the ASA stating that it did not make clear its commercial intent.

In its ruling the ASA upheld the complaint stating: “The ad seen by the complainant featured an image of a man being interviewed by a reporter, with “BREAKING NEWS” imposed on it in a style reminiscent of that used by some TV news channels.

“There was no information stating that it was an ad. We considered that the post gave the impression that it would link to editorial content regarding a lottery draw.”

It confirmed that the advertisement had breached consumer advertising protection standards 2.1 and 2.3, concerning the recognition of marketing communications, adding: “the Facebook post was not obviously identifiable as a marketing communication and did not make its commercial intent immediately clear."

Responding to the ruling, Annexio Ltd stated “that it was not their intention to deceive in any way”.

Annexio said they had stopped using such marketing communications on Facebook believing that the post was taken out of context, because they always labelled ads on Facebook as “sponsored”.