THE 150,000 tickets for the Live 8 charity concert in Hyde Park will be issued by an unprecedented mobile phone “text lottery”.

At 8am on Monday the organisers will reveal a multiple choice question with three possible answers and the number to text the answer to.

Fans will have seven days to send in the answers, after which 75,000 people will be notified that they have been allocated a pair of tickets.

Winners will then be given a code to enter in the Live 8 website and will have the option of having the tickets posted or picking them up from a collection point. There is no limit on the number of times that someone can text the answer to the database, increasing their chances of being selected by the computer.

But each entry will cost £1.50, which will be donated to the Live 8 charities, plus the mobile phone network operating fee. The organisers of Live 8 said that at present they were expecting the operators to keep the fee, meaning they stand to possibly make a windfall from the ticketing process.

Under the Gambling Act 2005, the question that is posed cannot be too simple.

A spokesman for the organisers said that they were confident it would not fall foul of this rule. “I was surprised how many people got it wrong. The question refers to the first Live Aid event and I assumed that it was easy but many people can’t remember 20 years ago.”

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