The string of numbers on the lottery ticket that Mark Fletcher bought matched those posted on the Lotto app perfectly.
He’d just won a cool £11million.
Except, well, he wasn’t looking at his ticket – he was looking at the National Lottery result checker. And, well, he hadn’t even bought a ticket to begin with.
Mark, 49, didn’t realise he’d become Britain’s unluckiest lottery player until he got on the phone with Lotto to confirm his winnings last month.
The father-of-one told the customer service agent that he had matched all six numbers drawn.
‘However, when I rang them up to check, I was on the phone for 45 minutes, and the woman was adamant I wasn’t a winner,’ he said.
‘Then I asked why it was telling me I’d won and if there was a fault with the app, and they denied that also.
‘I felt as if I was being put under a lie detector. She kept saying, “you haven’t bought that ticket, have you Mark?”‘
Mark, from Ashton-in-Makerfield, a town in Wigan, was looking at the results checker on the app rather than a ticket he had purchased.
Going from thinking he was an overnight millionaire to Britain’s unluckiest lottery player was already bad enough for Mark.
But how he was treated over the phone somehow made winning zero pounds even worse, he said.
‘When people play the Lotto, they think it’s a trustworthy service but I’m doubting that now,’ Mark explained.
‘They’ve not shown any empathy towards me.
‘It has impacted me – I’m left thinking about all the “what ifs”.
‘If they’ve told me I’ve won but in actual fact I’ve won nothing, it’s a bit cruel and I’ve had sleepless nights.’
Allwyn, a global lottery operator which runs the National Lottery, said that players can save a set of numbers in their app to check with any draws.
‘It has nothing to do with whether a player actually played the numbers or not,’ a spokesperson said.
‘In this case, the player did not play this set of six numbers via his online account for the draw on June 29, or indeed in any draws prior to the draw on June 29 taking place.’
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