El Gordo goes international?

Spain’s much-anticipated El Gordo Lottery (Lotería de Navidad) is gearing up to kick off its annual ticket sales and is apparently available through an online offering to punters outside of Spain.

Dubbed “the world’s richest lottery game”, El Gordo fever sweeps across Spain this time of the year with only 2 percent of all Spaniards abstaining from play, while the other 98 percent spend hours waiting in long queues to purchase their ticket.

The lottery prize pool this year is estimated to exceed Euro 2.5 billion. A ticket is divided into 10 shares (Decimas) affording players the option to buy all or just a portion of the ticket.

Lottery firm Win Trillions is offering online ticket bookings which once received will be purchased over the counter by the company’s Spanish agents. Once purchased, owner’s details are printed on the ticket and sent via a scanned copy to the buyer.

The lottery is drawn on December 22nd in a televised three hour marathon session watched by an estimated 20 million viewers and festivities spill into the streets of Spain following the draw.

“El Gordo is the world’s oldest and biggest lottery game, regularly attracting TV audiences in excess of 20 million for the three hour draw programme, and now it can be played around the world,” said Lucy Gold, spokesperson for WinTrillions. “The beauty of this game is that you have a great chance of winning, with 360 millionaires guaranteed to be created, winning up to Euro 4 million each.”

Wintrillions is one of three online gaming sites owned by Ledonford Ltd headquartered and operating in the Cyprus jurisdication.