Lambo Guy Adrian Portelli’s $8m Block giveaway derailed by tech issues
By Karl Quinn
A plan by Adrian Portelli, aka Lambo Guy, to give away the five properties from the latest season of The Block – or $8 million in cash – came to nothing on Thursday night as a live Facebook draw was derailed by “technical issues”.
Portelli runs giveaways through his members-only shopping discount site LMCT+, with levels of membership (ranging from $20 to $100 a month) conferring increasing numbers of entries. The 35-year-old, who was in court in Melbourne earlier this month contesting reckless driving charges, ultimately delivered on his promise that the draw would happen on Friday night instead.
Portelli (left) at the auction on this year’s The Block season finale.Credit: Nine
In a video posted from Phillip Island shortly after the failed prize draw on Boxing Day, he said: “I have made the decision to draw the winners tomorrow.”
He ascribed the failure to the website crashing “because of all the traffic running through”.
“I’m not playing around,” Portelli insisted. “I want to personally go over everything and ensure that everything is running as it should before we continue this giveaway. So we have paused it. We are going to run it [on Friday].
“This is what happens when you run things live, unfortunately, and this is how you know it’s all legitimate, because things like this happen.”
Adrian Portelli and a huge crowd at Friday night’s prize giveaway.
On the LMCT+ Facebook page, Portelli’s followers were overwhemingly supportive of the call. Post after post praised him as an “honest businessman” and an “awesome person” who had made the “right decision”. Person after person claimed they would be “waiting for the call tonight”.
“Love the honesty mate,” wrote one, though he spoke for many. “Exciting day ahead.”
Among almost 3000 comments, suggestions that Portelli was anything less than a legend were hard to come by.
The giveaway went ahead on Friday night, with Portelli announcing the winner to more than 110,000 viewers on Facebook, and hundreds of people who were there to watch the draw in-person at Phillip Island.
He began the live stream by assuring entrants that Thursday’s technical issues would not affect the giveaway’s results.
“Everyone’s entries are secured. [They] had nothing to do with our server that crashed,” Portelli said.
“[This] is Australian history. Never has this been done before.”
Faith in Portelli and his business model isn’t universal. On an unofficial LMCT+ Facebook page (one of many), the chatter took on a different tone after Thursday’s glitch.
“I use to be an LMCT member but just realised looking into it it’s a scam,” wrote one. “There’s a reason he’s going to court next month for it.”
South Australia’s gambling regulator has charged Portelli and his company Xclusive Tech Pty Ltd, which trades as LMCT+ (which stands for Licensed Motor Car Trader, plus), with nine counts of being involved in “the conduct of an unlawful lottery”.
The alleged offences relate to several promotions by Portelli and his business between January 2023 and May 2024, which included prizes of properties bought from The Block, cash of up to $3 million and luxury cars. (Channel Nine, which broadcasts The Block, is owned by Nine Entertainment Co, which also owns this masthead.)
This masthead is not suggesting that LMCT+ or Portelli is guilty of any illegal behaviour.
This is not the first time Portelli has been involved in an online competition affected by a technical glitch.
In November 2021, Xclusive Tech participated in an auction run online by Grays for a meticulously restored 1976 Ford Falcon coupe. Portelli was bidding against a rival “car raffle” company, Thomas Bailey’s Classics for a Cause, and won the vehicle – with licence plate XBOSS – with a bid of $860,100.
Adrian “Lambo Guy” Portelli and one of his much-loved cars.Credit: Kristoffer Paulsen
Initially, though, Bailey believed he had won the car with a bid of $464,900. With no further bids received within a 10-minute period, the online auction system automatically generated an email declaring “YOU HAVE WON!”
Unfortunately for Bailey, that was simply because a server linked to the auction had been set to UTC (co-ordinated universal) time rather than AEDT (Australian eastern daylight time), with the result that some bids were recorded as having been made 11 hours earlier than they actually were.
Once the glitch was discovered, a second auction was run, with Portelli winning the vehicle.
Bailey’s company took the matter to court in 2023, but lost – thanks to a clause in Grays’ user agreement covering “technological difficulties”, which allowed the company to declare a result void and run the auction again.
The terms and conditions for LMTC’s The Block giveaway state that the company is “not responsible for any problems or technical malfunction of computer systems, servers, software, internet service provider, or e-mail systems, failure of any entry to be received on account of technical problems or incomplete, late, lost, damaged, illegible or misdirected electronic communications, or any combination thereof”.
– With Cassandra Morgan