Page 1 of 1
It'll all come out in the wash
Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2016 10:01 pm
by Gob
A woman has come forward to claim the £33m National Lottery jackpot - but said the ticket had been washed in a pair of jeans.
The unnamed woman went to a newsagent in Worcester with the ticket bearing the winning numbers, but the date and barcode are illegible, Natu Patel, who runs Ambleside News in Warndon said.
Camelot confirmed on Friday the winning ticket was bought in Worcester.
It has urged the woman to get in touch and send it in within 30 days.
The National Lottery operator said: "If anybody believes they have bought the ticket and think they may have lost it, or washed it in their jeans, or it's been stolen, they need to make a claim within 30 days."
The prize money is half the record Lotto jackpot win - shared with a couple from Hawick who claimed their prize within days of the 9 January draw.
It'll all come out in the wash
Posted: Sun Jan 24, 2016 1:39 am
by RayThom
"The unnamed woman went to a newsagent in Worcester with the ticket bearing the winning numbers, but the date and barcode are illegible, Natu Patel, who runs Ambleside News in Warndon said."
So are we to understand that all the lotto number are legible? What are the chances? Are the lotto numbers printed with some special ink that's washer-proof but all other info is not?
My guess... this unnamed woman isn't coming clean with this ticket.
Re: It'll all come out in the wash
Posted: Sun Jan 24, 2016 1:35 pm
by MajGenl.Meade
So in a way she's been money laundering?
Ray - having washed a fair few winning lottery tickets in my time, I can assure you that the numbers are large while the date is quite small. it is entirely possible that a corruption of the numbers does not make it impossible to read them. Corruption in a tiny set of letters/numbers has a proportionally greater amount of damage, making them too difficult to read/reconstruct. Same with bar codes - losing a significant portion of that makes the entire bar useless. Losing the top half of 22 or 17 leaves sufficient useful data.
Too, if the ticket had been folded, some characters might be protected while others were more exposed.
One must ponder this - did the lady keep a losing ticket from days/weeks/months earlier, just hoping that one day those numbers she'd picked would be the actual big winner AND sold by a store in her town? The odds of ever having a set of lottery numbers come up are astounding enough - but this....?
Re: It'll all come out in the wash
Posted: Tue Jan 26, 2016 9:54 am
by Econoline
If the ticket were stuck in some random pocket of some random clothing, the "keeping" might have been just lucky and entirely inadvertent. I know from (repeated) personal experience that the odds against leaving some piece of paper in a pocket while doing the laundry are NOT particularly astronomical...
(Never washed a winning lottery ticket, though.)