Two homeless men who bought a winning lottery scratchcard with a stolen credit card have been offered a potentially lifechanging deal by their victim: a share of the €500,000 jackpot if they can produce the ticket.
The situation has left legal experts scratching their heads over who is the rightful owner of the so far unclaimed winnings: the person who bought the scratchcard, or the person who paid for it? And will the lottery operator pay out?
In what Le Parisien newspaper described as a story worthy of a film script, the homeless pair broke into a car parked in the centre of Toulouse, in south-west France, on 3 February and stole a backpack containing credit cards and identity documents belonging to a local man the paper named only as Jean-David.
The victim, 42, reported the theft to the police and contacted his bank to block his credit cards. He asked if the cards had been used and was informed that at 3pm that day, the thieves had used one of the cards to buy goods worth €52.50 (about £43.50) at a city-centre newsagents less than 500 metres from where his car had been parked.
More concerned about finding his identity papers, Jean-David decided to visit the newsagents the next morning to explain what had happened and see if they had CCTV to identify the thieves.
“I hoped at least to get my papers back but the newsagent said he hadn’t found anything. He said he remembered the two homeless men aged 30-40 coming into the shop and buying cigarettes and scratchcards. He found their behaviour suspicious because they paid with one card then wanted to buy something else but it hadn’t gone through and they couldn’t put in the code,” he told police.
After scratching the card and discovering they had won the maximum payout of €500,000 (nearly £414,000) the overjoyed pair returned to the shop to collect their winnings and were told to contact Française des Jeux, the company that runs France’s national lottery and had produced the scratchcard.
“The shop owner’s wife said she doubted very much I’d find them because she’d checked the card and they had won €500,000. She said they were so happy they even forgot their five packets of cigarettes,” Jean-David said.
Since then, the situation remains in a legal limbo. The thieves have not tried to collect their ill-gotten gains and police in Toulouse say Française des Jeux has frozen the winning ticket while investigations continue.
Jean-David has now invited the thieves to contact his lawyer. “Why not find a friendly arrangement? Why not share it?” he said.
His lawyer, Pierre Debuisson, told the local newspaper La Dépêche he believed Française des Jeux would be legally obliged to unblock the winning scratchcard if it was produced.
“It’s out of the question they cancel it because it was bought with a stolen card,” he said. “Those in possession of it don’t need to worry: our proposal is simple, without my client’s money they wouldn’t have won, without them my client wouldn’t have won. It’s only logical to share it.”
