• iconNews
  • videos
  • entertainment
  • Home
  • News
    • UK News
    • US News
    • Australia
    • Ireland
    • World News
    • Weird News
    • Viral News
    • Sport
    • Technology
    • Science
    • True Crime
    • Travel
  • Entertainment
    • Celebrity
    • TV & Film
    • Netflix
    • Music
    • Gaming
    • TikTok
  • LAD Originals
    • FFS PRODUCTIONS
    • Say Maaate to a Mate
    • Daily Ladness
    • UOKM8?
    • FreeToBe
    • Citizen Reef
  • Advertise
  • Terms
  • Privacy & Cookies
  • LADbible Group
  • UNILAD
  • SPORTbible
  • GAMINGbible
  • Tyla
  • UNILAD Tech
  • FOODbible
  • License Our Content
  • About Us & Contact
  • Jobs
  • Latest
  • Topics A-Z
  • Authors
Facebook
Instagram
X
Threads
Snapchat
TikTok
YouTube

LAD Entertainment

YouTube

LAD Stories

Submit Your Content
Man who ‘won’ £2million lottery prize spends 25 years trying to claim prize

Home> News> World News

Published 14:33 24 Dec 2023 GMT

Man who ‘won’ £2million lottery prize spends 25 years trying to claim prize

He claimed that he won the lottery but lost the ticket

Joe Harker

Joe Harker

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.

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.

Advert

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.

Robert Clemett claimed he found out he'd won the lottery when he saw a TV show about unclaimed lottery prizes four years later.
Facebook/Rob Ropata Clemett

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.

Advert

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'.

Clemett claimed he'd lost the ticket while moving house, but a court turned down his claim.
Getty Stock Photo

"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.

Advert

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.

Featured Image Credit: Facebook/Rob Ropata Clemett/SHAUN CURRY/AFP/Getty Images

Topics: Australia, Money

Joe Harker
Joe Harker

Joe graduated from the University of Salford with a degree in Journalism and worked for Reach before joining the LADbible Group. When not writing he enjoys the nerdier things in life like painting wargaming miniatures and chatting with other nerds on the internet. He's also spent a few years coaching fencing. Contact him via [email protected]

X

@MrJoeHarker

Advert

Advert

Advert

Choose your content:

3 hours ago
  • Richland Police Department
    3 hours ago

    Man taunted police by commenting on his own wanted poster on Facebook

    A simple wanted poster turned into a viral saga between a police station and a wanted man

    News
  • ARND WIEGMANN/AFP via Getty Images
    3 hours ago

    Inventor of ‘suicide pod’ shares new design that will let couples end lives together

    It's a very controversial invention, to say the least

    News
  • DM Trott
    3 hours ago

    Man who's done 182 drugs says one was ‘absolutely horrific’

    He's had a lot of bad experiences but this might have been the worst

    News
  • Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
    3 hours ago

    First US cities that would be targeted if World War 3 breaks out

    It's a scenario none of us want to see

    News
  • Man who won biggest TV prize in US history still hasn't received it seven months later
  • Man who won £5.4 million on lottery ended up homeless after one mistake 'destroyed his life'
  • Man who won £191k annual salary for life in huge lottery jackpot now faces losing his home
  • Luke Littler stands to lose almost half of his £1,000,000 prize