Not a lucky Dip

It’s every lottery player’s nightmare. You play the same numbers for years on the lottery, and then one draw you don’t and those numbers win the jackpot. Aaagh! But it could be worse, your ticket could be one bought on behalf of a syndicate, so not only have you lost out, but all your friends and colleagues have as well.

And that is just what happened to a syndicate of 30 workers in Belgium. The members live and work in Mouscron, a town south-west of capital Brussels and for weeks they had played the same numbers on the Euromillions lottery. So when members saw the draw on Friday night (8/12/06) with their numbers being the jackpot winners, they started calling round each other to spread the good news. One member though, knew otherwise, as she’d bought the ticket that week and knew that the machine had selected the numbers as a Lucky Dip, so the group were not the winners they thought they were.

The ticket buyer, owner of the town’s bookshop opposite the Café Fraternelle is now keeping a very low profile as some of the members state that they are not sure they will ever speak to her again. The jackpot stood at Euros 27million (£18,265,582) on this fateful Friday, which would have meant nearly Euros 900,000 (£608,000) for each member, but as it is, no one in Europe claimed the jackpot. The Belgian syndicate have instructed lawyers to try and claim something for the group in the name of ‘Christmas Justice’. The winning numbers were 16,17,18, 36, 47 and Lucky Stars 1,2, and the Euromillions Jackpot for 15 December now stands at £26 million (Euros 39 million).

- 11 December 2006