Lottery News

Ireland’s National Lottery, released a report which confirmed that four jackpot prizes worth a total of €180,000 (US$211,544), in three separate Scratch-Off went missing, which hindered their win, actually making it impossible to be won!

Actually, the problem goes back to 2019, when the National Lottery’s regulator was notified about the number of jackpots offered in three separate scratch-off games were inaccurate as compared to the number of jackpots actually put out for the lottery players. According to them, out of the 178 scratch-off games offered since 2014, the three of the games had missing jackpots. The issue came to light when the National Lottery performed an internal review which took place over six weeks and blamed “human error” for the mistake.

The scratch card games that got affected by the “error” were “Congratulations 186” and “Congratulations 223”, both from the year 2019, and “Diamond Bingo Doubler” that started in the year 2015.

In one of the “Congratulations” games, there were only two top prizes worth €50,000 (US$58,795), instead of four, while the other had one winnable €50,000 top prize instead of the two. Whereas the Diamond Bingo Doubler scratch-off game advertised four €30,000 (US$35,277) jackpots, but only three were available for a win.

After an internal audit, the National Lottery found that only 0.01% of all the prizes were impacted over the last four years, while the other games including Euro Millions, Daily Million, and other traditional lotto remain affected.

After looking into the details, the National Lottery apologized for the mistake and removed all the lottery games in question. The spokesperson of the National Lottery, Paul Bradley, stated that it was an honest mistake which hindered the player’s ability to win a prize that they didn’t even know was possible to win!

To rectify the mistakes, a New Year’s Special Draw took place on January 6, 2020, in which €180,000 of Premier Lotteries Ireland DAC's income was returned to players in the form of 180 guaranteed prizes of €1,000 (US$1,175) each, all of which have been claimed. In addition to this, the lottery operator also made a €50,000 (US$ 58,795) donation to Jigsaw, a youth mental health charity, to clarify that they can go without any contributions from sales of the affected scratch-off games.