By Todd Northrop
The United Kingdom National Lottery is putting out an urgent call for players to re-check their Lotto tickets from the Oct. 10 drawing because the Lottery published the wrong numbers on their website.
To promote the re-launching of the revamped Lotto game on Oct. 10, the UK National Lottery held an expanded raffle drawing that awarded 25 prizes of £1,000,000 (US$1.5 million). During a normal drawing the lottery would award just one prize of £1,000,000.
When the winning raffle numbers were published on the official UK National Lottery website that evening, the lottery posted a series of numbers that appeared to be real results, but were in fact just test data.
40 minutes later lottery management noticed the error and published the actual drawing results.
Now all but four of the 25 winning £1,000,000 raffle tickets have been redeemed. It is feared that the remaining four may have been held by players who looked at the test numbers and thought they didn't win — and then discarded their winning tickets.
Although the official UK National Lottery website published inaccurate raffle numbers that evening, Lottery Post's UK National Lottery Results page never published the test results, so players checking their winning numbers at Lottery Post only saw the accurate results. (The winning raffle numbers for the Oct. 10 drawing can be found on the Oct. 10 UK Lotto Raffle Results page.)
The four unclaimed raffle tickets from the Oct. 10 draw and their jurisdiction of purchase are:
- BLUE 2873 7030 - City of Leeds
- GREY 1239 0029 - City of Worcester
- LIME 4363 5202 - Borough of Tameside
- RUBY 4778 2862 - District of Huntingdonshire
"It was a simple human error, unfortunately," a Camelot spokesman explained. "We are making every effort to find these people. We have a process for lost, stolen or destroyed tickets. If someone thinks they have lost their ticket they can make a claim within 30 days."
Any person who steps forward to claim a prize without holding the actual winning ticket "needs to state details of where they purchased the ticket and the numbers they think they used and the name of the shop where they bought it," according to the spokesman.
Such a claim would have to take place within nine days. After that, only someone holding the actual ticket could make the claim, which would have to be before April 7, 2016.
If the winners do not claim their cash it will go towards projects funded by the National Lottery.
The only tix I throw away that are less then a month old are the ones bought in December,
and even those are checked on multiple sources.
I keep my tickets for tax purposes.
Test data my ass. Incompetence to the max. Real players do not throw away their tickets after the draw anyway. My problem with this is the fact that some people who thought they won big, now have to go back to their stupid jobs, that they have momentarily kissed goodbye. What a heartbreak!!!.
Yikes.
30 days huh, is that 30 days from the mistake, or 30 days from the date that UK lotteries actually owned up to their boobery, and actually reported it as news? even so, being an avid lotto player, i like to actually check my own numbers at the draw, and again on the self checking machine. well when i used to buy tickets, now theyre mostly digital and i rely solely on their programs to check the numbers and alert me of prizes. hmmm maybe im too trusting.
i wonder how many of the actual claimant winners where via digital tickets? 21 perhaps?
An error? yeah like I'm supposed to believe that line.
Everything is fine and dandy when the lottery company cheats it's players, but let a lottery player try cheating the lottery and see where that gets you. Bet they won't allow you to call it a mistake or error and make like nothing ever happened!
The Horsesho e Casino in Cleveland tried pulling that crap with me and denying me my $25000 when they told me it was a mistake and that the machines can not produce more than a 5000 win.
And my tickets are never thrown out immediately after a draw, I file them in my filing cabinet and discard them at the end of the year in case the lottery feels the need to be crooked and lie and deny my winnings.
You never throw away tickets because they can be used for tax purposes here in this country. But in the UK they DO NOT pay taxes on lottery winnings. So they do throw it away after the drawings. People in the UK trust their systems so it does not surprise me that they threw them out. They are too trusting of a society.
Hmmm.... I thought old tickets can only be used for tax purposes if you won a bigger prize over $600 and have to make a claim? Otherwise it's just wasted printed paper.
I think that you save the tickets and add them up then you deduct a certain percentage from your tax bill.
The percentage depends upon your tax rate. A CPA would know about this.