Lotto player takes Camelot to High Court over £1million jackpot

A woman is taking lottery operator Camelot to court over a £1million Lotto ‘jackpot’ she claims the firm is refusing to pay out.

Joan Parker-Grennan was stunned when she found she had a winning scratchcard for the £20Million Online Spectacular game.

In the internet game, Joan matches matched two 15s to win £10, but hit the jackpot by matching two 1s for £1million. 

But when the 53-year-old contacted Camelot to claim her prize in 2015, the company said that the game had suffered a ‘technical issue’, and that the £1m winning numbers had been displayed in the wrong boxes.

Seven years on, company bookkeeper Joan is now taking the firm to the High Court after launching a legal claim last year.

Joan, from Boston, Lincolnshire, told : ‘My solicitors have already offered them the chance to settle and https://fisalpro.net/ pay £700,000, £800,000 or £900,000.

‘They took the game offline within a day of me making the claim. They told me in an email it was a glitch.’

The claims comes weeks after it was announced Camelot would be stripped of its National Lottery licence after nearly 30 years in charge, in favour of the Czech lottery operator.

According to court records, Camelot filed its own High Court claim against the Gambling Commission on Thursday over the decision.

The firm was also last month fined £3.15 million for three different errors on its mobile app that affected tens of thousands of players.

These a long-running incident in which up to 20,000 users who were told their winning tickets were losing tickets when they scanned a QR code.

 In the case of Joan, Camelot claims software behind the game behaved ‘erroneously’ during Joan’s ‘win’.  

Joan’s £1million claim is for ‘monies due under the terms of a consumer contract between the parties and/or damages for breach of a consumer contract’.

She is toying with ideas of what she’d do with any winnings. She said: ‘I’d like a kitchen island and we could invest but we’re more likely to spend it helping others.’ 

Camelot said the incident related to ‘a very small number of National Lottery players who had a problem when playing the £20million Cash Spectacular Online Instant Win Game, relating to how the game animation displayed.

‘The outcome of every National Lottery Instant Win Game play is pre-determined at time of purchase, and the animation is purely for entertainment purposes.

‘The game had been on sale less than 12 hours when we became aware of the issue and immediately disabled it.

‘There is a hearing in June but a trial date has not yet been set.’