UK: Teen heartbroken after winning £182m jackpot before finding out ticket payment failed
Rachel Kennedy, who was 19 at the time of the incident, and Liam McCrohan, 21, from Hertfordshire, played the winning numbers for five weeks in a row before they came up in a draw in February 2021.
But their excitement was soon cut short when they realised they had ‘won’ nothing. Ms Kennedy’s account was automatically set up to enter the draw with her usual numbers but her account did not have the right funds, meaning the payment did not go through.
For a brief moment, she thought she had hit the jackpot when she was notified saying her usual numbers were a ‘Winning Match’. Ms Kennedy was “on top of the world” over her apparent success before she realised the mistake.
“I went on the app and it said ‘Winning Match’ and I thought ‘Oh my god I’ve won,” she told the Sun. “So I called my boyfriend Liam and my mum into the room and they couldn’t believe it either so I was like ‘oh my god I need to call them’.
“I called the number thinking that I had won £182million and they said ‘yeah you’ve got the right numbers but you didn’t have the funds in your account for the payment of the ticket so it didn’t actually go through’. “I was on top of the world when I thought I had won but when I found out I hadn’t, Liam was actually more upset than I was.”
Mr McCrohan said he was “absolutely heartbroken” to realise they had just missed out after having already begun working out how they would spend the money.
“She was quite relaxed about it but I had kind of spent it in my head already,” he said. “I was absolutely heartbroken when we heard the man on the phone say we hadn’t actually bought the ticket. I was already picturing our dream house and the dream car, I think I was getting a bit carried away to be fair. On the app it really made it look like we had won because it comes up in orange and it says winning match.”
