How to Prevent Missing Your Lottery Jackpot Win
As simple as this advice seems, if you want to win a lottery jackpot, you have to claim your winnings.
More often than not, people remember to check their ticket and claim their prize, yet there are still billions of euros left unclaimed and hundreds of would-be-winners left empty handed each year.
Since so many of us dream of winning big, our skin crawls at the idea of holding those lucky numbers and letting our prize slip through our fingers. Before we discuss how winners can be so unlucky, let’s look at the most shocking fortunes that have eluded their ticket holders.
Here’s What You Could Have Won
The most recent unclaimed prize, on Dec 28, 2017, was a EuroMillions ticket worth €500,000. Sadly, this isn’t the first time a EuroMillions win was left without a home. In 2012 an unclaimed £64 million jackpot passed one UK ticket holder by. Even more unsettling are the big payouts still waiting to be claimed. There are currently 5 million-pound wins that will pass their ticket holders by if they’re left unclaimed by May 2018. Gasp!
Before you assume this phenomenon is limited to the UK hold onto your hats, because it turns out this problem plagues would-be-winners worldwide. In fact, over the past 15 years, 5 people in the USA won a jackpot and failed to claim their Powerball or Mega Millions prize. Those near wins are draw-dropping, as two of the forgotten jackpots stood at $31M and $77M.
It’s easy to guess why these massive prizes go unclaimed. People lose their tickets, forget to check their numbers or simply don’t realise just because they didn’t hit the jackpot doesn’t mean they didn’t win on a different prize tier. Although, all these reasons are understandable, it doesn’t stop us from feeling heartbroken for those people who came so close to living our dream. If anything, understanding this problem is terrifying because human error is hard to avoid.
When you purchase a lottery ticket you have up to 90 days after the draw to claim your prize. One would assume that 3 months is plenty of time. Yet, imagine misplacing your ticket and finding it a year later only to discover you had held the winning numbers, but that you waited too long to do some spring cleaning. Just thinking about the agony of that realisation is enough to send shivers down our spines…
We’re sure your heart is pumping as hard as ours right now, so we’ll let you in on our little secret. You never have to worry about missing an enormous payout again.
You already know that with Jackpot.com you can place a bet on 18 of the biggest lotteries worldwide online, but have you thought about what that means? It means it is impossible for you to lose a winning ticket. Better yet, we email all winners and even telephone the big winners, so it is inconceivable that you could forget to check your numbers or not realise you won on any prize tier.
Now that you are in the know, there’s no reason you should ever become one of the unclaimed prize winners we anxiously read about online. Bet on the Mega Millions, Powerball and more of your favourite draws with us today and rest easy knowing if you win, the opportunity won’t pass you by.
