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UK Couple Misses Out On $52 Million Lottery Jackpot Thanks To Cell Phone Glitch

By Aaron Homer
Published on: 08:48 PST, Jan 1, 2016

Meet the unluckiest couple in the world: Edwina and David Nylan thought they’d won £35 million (about $52 million) in the lottery, only to find out their ticket purchase that they thought they’d made on their cell phone didn’t go through. Now the couple is battling it out with lottery officials over the missed jackpot.

As the Huffington Post reports, the couple purchased – or at least, they thought they purchased – a ticket with the eventual winning numbers on December 23. Using her cell phone (the U.K. national lottery has a program where players can purchase tickets with their cell phones, provided they have money in an account that the lottery can draw from), Edwina tried to purchase a ticket containing six numbers that she and her husband had chosen at random. When she was notified that she didn’t have enough money in her lottery account for the purchase, she added more. She then completed her purchase – or so she believed at the time – and even got confirmation.

When the winning numbers (01 – 02 – 04 – 19 – 28 – 41, according to the Telegraph) came up, Edwina was overjoyed. But when she called Camelot (the company that manages the U.K. Lottery), she said her “world came crashing down.” The lottery company said they had no record of her purchase.

“When the numbers came up, it looked like we had got all six and had won the jackpot but when I checked, there was nothing from Camelot. 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.”

And how does she describe the feeling of briefly thinking you’re a multi-millionaire and then just as quickly being broke again?

“I am gutted, but what can we do? We have played for years, and had our online account for some time, so it is not as if we didn’t know what we were doing.”

The couple are trying to work out a resolution with Camelot, but so far the company is standing firm.

A spokesperson for the national lottery confirmed that their records indicate the couple trying – multiple times – to add money to their account, before and after the 7:30 p.m. deadline. The money eventually was added to their account, and the lottery ticket purchase went through, but it was well after the deadline.

“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 company also said that if she had successfully purchased the lottery ticket on her phone app, she would have gotten an email confirmation. Edwina concedes that she didn’t check her email, saying she was too busy with the Christmas season.

With her options for claiming the missed lottery jackpot seemingly running out, the couple have little choice be to accept their rotten luck and move on – something Edwina admits has been hard to do.

“I have just had to carry on with things and not get too down. Shocked isn’t the word, but as a family we stick together and just have to be grateful for what we’ve got.”

Do you believe the U.K. couple have a legitimate complaint and should get their lottery winnings? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

[Image via Shutterstock/Cylonphoto]

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