Late Lottery Claim
Last Updated: Thursday 22nd November 2018, 14:54
A couple of Lotto players from Spalding in South Lincolnshire matched five numbers plus the bonus ball on Valentine's Day (Saturday 14 February, 2009) but didn’t realise it until several weeks later. Chris Gaff and his wife Janet only discovered their win when reading about a ‘missing’ National Lottery winner in their local newspaper.
Chris explained how it all came about: “I’d been on a business trip to Zurich during the week and was catching up on the news in our local papers, when I read about the campaign to find a missing Lotto ticket in our area,” he said. “For a while I couldn’t even find our ticket, but when I eventually discovered it in a pile of paperwork and began to check the numbers, it gradually dawned on me that I was the ‘missing person’ and was holding the winning ticket in my hand.”
Like many previous lottery winners, Chris decided to get his wife to double-check the lottery results for him.
“I was getting ready for a social event and Chris kept calling up the stairs asking if I knew where our old lottery tickets were,” Janet explained. “I was preoccupied with painting my nails at the time and wasn’t taking too much notice of him, but all of a sudden he came bursting into our bedroom holding a local paper in one hand and waving a Lottery ticket in another and asking me to double check the numbers. When he pushed the ticket into my hand it got covered in nail polish, but thankfully I could still read the numbers and that was when we finally realised that we were the missing winners.”
And what will the couple be doing with their lucky Lotto win?
“We had been saving to take a cruise around Norway, but our win means that we can now go ahead and book it,” Chris said. “This year we’ll be celebrating 37 years of marriage and we can’t think of a more romantic way of spending some of our very special Valentines Day present.”