I chose winning numbers for £35million lottery but ended up with nothing after silly oversight – don’t make same mistake
A COUPLE who claimed to have chosen the winning numbers to a £35million jackpot ended up with nothing after a silly oversight.
Edwina and David Nylan thought they won the eye-watering £35,410,034 prize but didn’t realise a glitch until they called the lottery headquarters to claim their prize.
The couple say they got all six of the winning lottery numbers but due to an error on the app, Lottomobile, the online ticket purchase failed to go through.
Their online lottery account showed that it didn’t have the money to go through with the purchase of the £2 ticket, before they topped up the money.
But when they called to claim their jackpot prize Camelot told them they had no record of the transaction.
The pair say the mobile app shows they bought a ticket for the draw on December 23, before leaving them “gutted” back in 2015.
Edwina, then 55, said: “I am gutted, but what can we do?
“We have played for years, and had our online account for some time, so it is not as if we didn’t know what we were doing.
“I have just had to carry on with things and not get too down.
“Shocked isn’t the word, but as a family we stick together and just have to be grateful for what we’ve got.”
When Edwina, a grandmother-of-seven, first tried to purchase her £2 ticket online for the Lotto draw on Wednesday, December 23, her account showed she had insufficient funds.
The couple then added more money into the account and bought a ticket using the numbers 01 – 02 – 04 – 19 – 28 – 41.
However, despite the app confirming that the later purchase had gone through, Camelot Group – the operator of the UK National Lottery – said there was no record of the transaction.
Edwina said: “David has an app on his phone which he uses to generate random numbers.
“We scribbled them down, and they are stored on his phone.
“When the numbers came up, it looked like we had got all six and had won the jackpot but when I checked, there was nothing from Camelot.
“I rang customer services at Camelot and the person I spoke to said they could see from their records that we had intended to buy those numbers but they said the purchase did not go through because we only had 60p in our account.
“We had tried to top up the account, and hadn’t realised that hadn’t registered either.
“You get an email to confirm your purchase, but I didn’t remember to check because it was just before Christmas and I was so busy.
“Camelot has now told me they are looking into it with their IT department.”
Edwina and David, from Fleetwood, Lancs., are carrying on playing the Lottery despite the disappointment but are battling with Camelot to get the money they’re owed.
Camelot was able to confirm that the couple attempted to buy the tickets multiple times but could not confirm whether or not they would have won.
“The player did attempt to purchase an online Lotto ticket multiple times on December 23 from 7pm onwards (the cut-off to buy tickets is 7.30pm), however, there were insufficient funds in the player’s account – so the attempted purchases were not successful,” said a spokesperson.
“The player would have received an error message on every occasion confirming this.
“Only tickets that have been successfully purchased can be entered into the draw.
“So it is up to players to ensure that they have adequate funds in their account to complete a ticket purchase.”
It comes after a man who scooped a £105million lotto jackpot revealed he wishes he had never won and wants a normal life again.
Meanwhile, a woman who spent £3 on the lottery while enjoying a drink at the pub scooped a £300k jackpot, but only received a quarter of it.