National Lottery publishes wrong winning numbers

Updated
The publication of the wrong numbers.
The publication of the wrong numbers.



National Lottery officials have been forced to apologise after publishing the wrong winning numbers for a £19 million draw.

Giving out the results for the Euromillions Lucky Stars draw on Friday night, the lottery website said that the winning 'lucky stars' were five and six - rather than the five and eight that had actually been drawn.

The same wrong numbers were repeated on the BBC News.

"We've fixed this now and all prizes were processed correctly, but we're very sorry for any inconvenience caused," officials say.

However, some players who initially thought they'd won are understandably upset.

"@TNLUK are going to have angry people today after the euromil draw. Website say Lucky stars are 5 & 6, they tweet 5 & 8... I got the latter!" Da Silva Fox wrote on Twitter.

Another, Robert Campbell, added: "You've bumped me out of £2 what's the right numbers, surely no that hard to look at 7 balls and then display what the draw has been?"

No one matched all the numbers for the draw, so that it was rolled over to Tuesday - when there was no overall winner once again.

It's the second time in just a couple of weeks that the National Lottery has seriously annoyed players. On Wednesday last week, so many people matched five balls correctly that when the money was shared out, they only won £15 each - less than the £25 won by people matching three.

And back in October, Camelot again published the wrong winning numbers on its website. While the mistake was corrected, it later emerged that as many as four million-pound winners might have thrown away their tickets, believing that they'd lost.

If you do discover that you've lost or thrown away a winning ticket, the bad news is that the National Lottery is under no legal obligation to pay out. However, if you put in a claim within 30 days of the draw, you may be in with a chance.

You'll need to give details of when you bought the ticket, which draw it was for and the location of the shop where it was bought, so that officials can check if you're telling the truth. One hopes that if the ticket was thrown away because of Camelot's own misinformation, the company would be sympathetic.

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