What happens when you lose winning lotto tickets?
Imagine you buy lotto tickets and pull in a jackpot win worth millions.
You tell your family and friends, throw a big party and tell your loved ones exactly how you’re going to change their lives for the better. Plans are made about how you’ll spend the money, from overseas trips to new houses and everything in between.
Then the horror sinks in; you’ve lost your ticket.
This is what happened to Martyn Tott. Martyn was unable to claim the jackpot prize and was left wondering what could have been.
No lost, damaged or expired tickets with The Lottery Office
The Lottery Office understands how easy it can be to lose a winning ticket or to simply forget about them. People have even put their tickets through the wash, ruining them and making them completely void!
Lost or damaged tickets is one of the reasons we operate an online-only platform. There are no paper tickets to lose or get stolen. You don’t even need to check your results when playing with us (although some players still prefer to check our results page to see if they won a prize after a draw). This is because when we send you the results of each draw we alert you when you’ve won a prize.
This means that you don’t need to claim prizes you win when you play with us; we do the work for you by checking the outcome of the draws you enter and paying you any prizes without you having to contact us. This takes away the possibility of any wins expiring!
For prizes worth less than $10,000 we pay them straight into your Lottery Office account once we’ve processed the results of the draw. If you win more than $10,000 we’ll be in touch to organise the best way that you would like us to get your prize to you.
The Lottery Office prides itself on doing things differently to traditional lotteries and we aim to get your prizes to you as quickly as possible, with no work needed on your behalf. After all, why should you have to chase us to get the prize money that’s rightfully yours!
When you play with The Lottery Office, you get to avoid any potentially horrible situations, like those below.
Imagine throwing the winning ticket away!
Janet Valenti, from New York, claims to be the winner of an unclaimed USD$12 million jackpot from way back in 1991.
After mistakenly throwing out the winning ticket, she realised too late that she’d missed out on the huge windfall.
The prize was eventually returned to the state lottery fund and to this day holds the record for the largest unclaimed prize in New York history.
She continues to play the lottery today.
Time limits on jackpot claims for some lotteries
For winners that lose their tickets, even if they find them later there’s still no guarantee that they’ll be able to claim the prize.
This is because most lotteries impose an expiry date on claiming prizes, and often this is not as generous as one could expect.
Imagine losing your jackpot-winning ticket, only to find it months later, after the deadline for claiming the win had expired!
If you choose to play your lottery with a different lotto provider we suggest you keep any physical tickets under lock and key and be very aware of any time limits on claiming winnings. It could be the difference between getting your hands on a potentially life-altering prize and kicking yourself that you missed out!
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