A website boasting promoting the ‘leading providers’ of online divorces has been told to stop making the claim as it cannot be substantiated.

An advertisement on the Quickie Divorce YouTube channel featured a woman speaking to camera and saying the site was ‘firmly established as the UK’s leading providers of online divorces’.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) this week ruled to uphold a complaint that the claim could not be substantiated.

Its ruling, published online today, said: ‘We considered that, to substantiate claims of market leadership, Quickie Divorce should have provided detailed comparative data for their main competitors, illustrating that they acted on behalf of clients in a greater number of divorces.  

‘In the absence of such evidence, we concluded that their claim to be the “UK’s leading providers of online divorces” had not been substantiated and was misleading.’

Quickie Divorce Ltd, which owns the website, said its competitors did not publish the total number of divorces they had filed.

However, based on Ministry of Justice figures for divorce petitions to a particular county court, the company had the majority of the market share.

The respondent further said that in total 32,025 divorce petitions were filed between April and June 2013 – a period during which Quickie Divorce assisted 6,486 people, thereby covering 22.5% of market share.

But the ASA judged Quickie Divorce had not shown that it acted for clients in this number of divorces and that it was unable to ascertain the total number of divorces worked on by competitors during this period.

The advertisement was found to have breached three rules and the ASA said it must not appear again in its current form.

The authority said any future advertising must not include the claim ‘UK’s leading providers of online divorces’ unless it possesses ‘robust evidence’ to substantiate it.