Man who ‘won’ £2million lottery prize spends 25 years trying to claim prize
A man who claimed to have won £2 million on the lottery but lost the winning ticket has spent over 20 years trying to get his hands on the money.
All the way back in 1997 in Australia a jackpot which was supposedly won but never claimed ended up turning into a years-long saga.
Nobody won the major jackpot which had been up for grabs on 23 September, but four years later Robert Clemett started claiming he was the lucky winner.
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According to the Daily Telegraph, Clemett started claiming the lottery prize was his after a programme was shown on TV in 2001 about unclaimed lottery jackpots.
He wrote to the lottery company to tell them he used to own the winning ticket, but had lost it when he had been moving house the year before.
However, Robert's claim was one of about 50 from people writing in and trying to say they'd been the holders of the winning ticket.
In the end he took NSW Lotteries to court, claiming he'd bought the winning ticket in September 1997 at Greenfield Park Newsagency in Sydney.
Seeking £2 million, his claim was instead dismissed by a judge in 2014 after they decided he'd not managed to establish that he probably had entered the draw with the six winning numbers.
Justice Lucy McCallum said it was also unlikely that Clemett could have suddenly remembered the winning numbers four years after the jackpot went unclaimed.
The judge didn't discount the possibility that Clemett now genuinely believed he'd once owned the ticket, saying that he 'appears to have persuaded himself over a period of years'.
"His fixation on that as an immutable fact has prompted him over the years to bend all of the surrounding evidence to meet it," the judge said of Clemett's apparent belief that he once held a winning lottery ticket.
She said she wasn't convinced by his evidence and ordered him to pay the legal costs of NSW Lotteries.
Clemett did not drop the matter, as five years later he posted to Facebook to vent his anger at not being paid the lottery money.
The Australian man wrote that he 'begged' the court to reconsider their verdict in order to restore what he saw as a 'SEMBLANCE OF JUSTICE'.
As for a man who genuinely did win the lottery but lost the ticket, a man named Martyn Tott once bagged a £3 million prize but didn't realise he'd picked the winning numbers until six months later.
By then the ticket had gone and though he was able to prove he'd bought it, Martyn missed out after being told he'd not registered the ticket as lost within 30 days.
Then again, some people wish they'd never won it in the first place.
Joe Harker