A teen who thought she’d won big with £182million on the EuroMillions was left high and dry after discovering the payment for her ticket didn’t go through.
Rachel Kennedy and her partner Liam McCrohan, from Hertfordshire, started planning out their ‘dream lives’ after she got a notification to say the seven lottery numbers were a ‘winning match’. The pair, who were 19 and 21 at the time, had been playing with the same numbers - 6, 12, 22, 29, 33, 6 and 11 for five weeks in a row.
The dreams soon crumbled when they were informed that Rachel didn’t have the funds in her account at the time of paying for the £2.50 ticket. Despite this, she thought she had won due to a glitch where she received the winning notification.
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She told The Sun: “I called my boyfriend 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.
Liam, who had mapped out big plans for their future, said: “Rachel was quite relaxed about it but I had kind of spent it in my head already.
"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.”
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Camelot, who have been the operators of the lottery since 1994, heard about the mistake and sent the couple a good luck message for future draws. A spokesperson for the company said: “We’re aware of Rachel’s story and hope she gets in early to buy a ticket for the next big draw.
Rachel has said she won’t be using the same numbers now, believing they’re unlucky. She said: “I actually have two sets of numbers that I use.
“One of them is birthdays of family members and stuff, but the ones that were the winner were just random numbers that I had clicked one day and had been using ever since. We’re absolutely not going to keep using those numbers now, I’ve already changed them.”
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