Woman taking Lottery operators to court after £1m 'jackpot' not paid
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A woman is taking the company which operates the Lottery to court over a £1 million “jackpot” that has not been paid to her. But Camelot says Joan Parker-Grennan never actually won the prize.
Joan was said to be delighted when she found she had a winning online scratchcard on a £20Million Online Spectacular game in 2015. She was even happier to see she’d landed a million.
However, when the 53-year-old contacted Camelot to claim her winnings, they told her there had been a “technical issue” that meant the game displayed numbers in the wrong boxes. That meant she only won £10.
After years of arguing with the company – fined millions last month for separate technical glitches on its mobile app – furious company bookkeeper Joan launched a legal claim in 2021. Her lawyers are now set to take Camelot to High Court.
Joan, who lives with husband Dave, 60, in Boston, Lincolnshire, said: “My solicitors have already offered them the chance to settle and pay £700,000, £800,000 or £900,000. They took the game offline within a day of me making the claim. They told me in an email it was a glitch.”
Camelot ran the National Lottery for 28 years but was told last month it was losing it to a Czech company. It claims software behaved “erroneously” during Joan’s “win”.
In the game the top row of numbers were matched to those beneath. Joan matched two 15s for a tenner but also two ones for a million. Last month Camelot was fined £3.15m by the Gambling Commission for technical issues on its mobile app.
First, 20,000 users were told their winning tickets were losing tickets when they scanned a QR code, then a separate glitch affected 22,000 players who bought single tickets but got two and were charged for both. Joan’s £1 million claim is for “monies due under the terms of a consumer contract between the parties and/or damages for breach of a consumer contract”.
She is toying with ideas of what she’d do with any winnings. She said: “I’d like a kitchen island and we could invest but we’re more likely to spend it helping others.” Camelot said the incident related to “a very small number of National Lottery players who had a problem when playing the £20Million Cash Spectacular online Instant Win Game, relating to how the game animation displayed.
“The outcome of every National Lottery Instant Win Game play is pre-determined at time of purchase, and the animation is purely for entertainment purposes. “The game had been on sale less than 12 hours when we became aware of the issue and immediately disabled it. There is a hearing in June but a trial date has not yet been set.”
