Misreading lottery ticket lands big spender in court

A French woman who thought she'd won the lottery went on a massive spending spree - only to discover that she didn't have the winning numbers after all.

The unnamed 41-year-old woman, from the Haut-Doubs area of eastern France, is reported on French media to have splashed out around £3,000 on clothes, perfume, jewellery and other luxuries after believing she'd won the Euromillions lottery.

But her husband became concerned that the lottery company was taking a long time to pay out, and asked to see the numbers himself. When she showed him her 'winning' ticket, he realised that one of her numbers was wrong.

As a result, the woman's cheques bounced, and she ended up in court in Besancon on fraud charges. In a desperate bid to avoid taking responsibility for the luxury purchases, she at first claimed that her handbag had been stolen with her chequebook inside, and even set fire to it to try and cover her tracks.

But CCTV from the stores she'd visited gave the game away, and the woman finally broke down in tears and pleaded guilty. She's been given a four-month suspended prison sentence and ordered to pay the money back.

The story shows the importance of checking and double-checking - not to mention calling the lottery company for confirmation - before splashing any of your new-found cash.

It's by no means the first time this sort of thing has happened, after all. Just last month, for example, a group of 42 restaurant workers in New Jersey compared their numbers with the wrong day's draw and thought they'd won $949 million. One quit his job on the spot - before the group discovered that they hadn't won at all.

More often, people are denied a winning ticket by a glitch in the system - like the New Mexico man who was recently told that the winning numbers on his scratchcard were a misprint.

Or there's the case of the Canadian man who missed getting a winning ticket by seconds, simply because the printer was too slow.

The moral of the story is to never count your chickens before they're hatched - always, always get confirmation from the lottery company before you start to spend.