A COUPLE who thought they had won £35million on the lottery ended up with nothing because they didn’t have enough money in their bank account.
Edwina and David Nylan, from Fleetwood, Lancs, missed out on the life-changing lottery windfall because there was only 60p in their account.
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The couple thought they matched six of the winning lottery numbers while playing on the Lottomobile app at Christmas.
Edwina and David said they bought a ticket for the draw on December 23, 2015.
Their account showed they didn’t have the cash to go pay for the purchase of the £2 ticket, so they topped it up and
bought a ticket using the numbers 01 – 02 – 04 – 19 – 28 – 41.
But when the cash strapped couple tried to claim the whopping £35,410,034 jackpot prize Camelot told them they had no record of the transaction.
Edwina said: “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.
“We had tried to top up the account, and hadn’t realised that 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.”
However, the couple are determined to soldier on and keep playing the lottery.
Edwina said: “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.
“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.”
Camelot claimed the couple attempted to buy the tickets multiple times but it couldn’t confirm whether or not they would have won.
A spokesperson said: “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.
“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.”