Though luck gambling story of the year

In what must be among the worst tough luck gambling stories this year an elderly UK couple claim that they missed out on a GBP 35 million lottery jackpot just before Christmas due to a faulty app.

Edwina (55) and David Nylan (60) have had a Camelot lottery online account and have been buying their lottery tickets online for years, using the Lottomobile app.

Edwina told the Daily Mail newspaper that they tried to purchase their tickets as usual for the giant December 23 draw but their online lottery account showed it did not have enough funds to enable the purchase.

They then topped-up their account with more funds and bought a ticket with the numbers 01 – 02 – 04 – 19 – 28 – 41, which turned out to be the winning numbers. The Lottomobile app confirmed the purchase, they say.

However, when they called Camelot to claim the massive prize, they were shocked to learn that the online ticket purchase failed to go through.

“I rang customer services at Camelot and the person I spoke to said they could see from their records that we had intended to buy those numbers but they said the purchase did not go through because we only had 60p in our account,” Ewina recalls.

“We had tried to top up the account, and hadn’t realised that it hadn’t registered either.

“You get an email to confirm your purchase, but I didn’t remember to check because it was just before Christmas and I was so busy.

“Camelot has now told me they are looking into it with their IT department.”

Approached for comment, Camelot confirmed the couple did make multiple attempts to buy a ticket. A spokeswoman for Camelot said following a call on December 24, a member of their customer service team had spoken to Mrs Nylan twice.

“The player did attempt to purchase an online Lotto ticket multiple times on December 23 from 7pm onwards (the cut-off to buy tickets is 7.30pm), however there were insufficient funds in the player’s account – so the attempted purchases were not successful.

“The player would have received an error message on every occasion confirming this.

“We do not have any record of the player attempting to add funds to their account, nor would anyone from our customer services team have any visibility of the numbers that the player attempted to purchase because that level of detail wouldn’t be shown on the screen in front of them.

“When anyone successfully purchases a ticket on the Lottery website they will see a purchase confirmation screen, receive an email confirming their purchase and be able to see the ticket in their National Lottery online account.

“Only tickets that have been successfully purchased can be entered into the draw.

“So it is up to players to ensure that they have adequate funds in their account to complete a ticket purchase.”