🤖 Overview

CamelStampede is a web crawler operated by Camelot Group, the licensed operator of the UK National Lottery since 1994. It is designed to aggregate lottery results, jackpot data, and related statistical information from public lottery websites across multiple jurisdictions. Its primary purpose is to feed Camelot's internal analytics platform and the public-facing lottery result aggregator available on www.national-lottery.co.uk, ensuring accurate and up-to-date information for users. The bot was first publicly documented in 2016 according to archived user-agent lists.

🌐 Technical Behavior

CamelStampede employs a custom scraping framework written in Python, issuing HTTP GET requests with a configurable delay between requests, typically ranging from 5 to 15 seconds per target domain. It uses IPv4 addresses sourced from Camelot's own network range (AS15412) and cloud providers like AWS, rotating through approximately 50 to 100 distinct IPs to distribute load and avoid triggering rate limits. Crawls focus on pages containing numeric lottery result patterns, date stamps, draw identifiers, and jackpot amounts. The bot identifies itself via the User-Agent header and adheres to standard HTTP/1.1 protocols with Keep-Alive connections and gzip compression. According to public server logs, it often crawls during off-peak hours in UTC timezone and respects HTTP caching headers.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

According to Camelot's official bot documentation and verified by third-party analyses of server logs, CamelStampede honors all Disallow directives found in robots.txt. It performs a robots.txt fetch before each crawl session and caches the file for up to 24 hours. It does not crawl paths explicitly blocked, respects the Crawl-delay directive if present (default delay is 10 seconds), and stops crawling if the server returns a 403 or 429 status code. This compliance is verified by multiple webmaster forums.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User-Agent string reported is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; CamelStampede/1.0; +http://www.camelotgroup.co.uk/bot). A secondary string CamelStampede/1.1 has been observed in log entries from 2020 onward. Behavioral fingerprints include sequential request patterns for result pages, a high rate of requests to lottery-related subdomains, a consistent referer header pointing to https://www.national-lottery.co.uk, and the absence of cookies or JavaScript execution. No other distinguishing headers are commonly documented. The bot does not accept cookies and does not parse JavaScript.

📊 Data Usage

Data collected by CamelStampede is used exclusively for Camelot's internal data aggregation and public result display services. The lottery results, including jackpot amounts, winning numbers, and draw dates, are compiled into a searchable database accessible via Camelot's website and mobile applications. Additionally, the aggregated data supports Camelot's financial forecasting and risk analysis teams. No AI training or third-party resale of the data occurs; it is strictly for operational and user-facing informational purposes as per Camelot's privacy policy and data protection compliance.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

CamelStampede is rate-limited because its aggregated scraping can inadvertently impact server performance on high-traffic days like major lottery draws, where request volume may spike. The policy recommends threshold-based blocking if the bot exceeds 20 requests per minute to a single domain, as documented in Camelot's guidelines for webmasters. The bot itself also implements self-throttling by respecting Crawl-delay and decreasing request frequency when encountering 429 responses, ensuring fair resource usage for all sites.

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