Camelot, the current National Lottery operator has found itself in hot water after scratch card winner Joan Parker-Brennan from Boston, Lincolnshire decided to take legal action after they refused to pay the £1M Jackpot win.
Delighted
Back in 2015, Joan bought a scratch card and was delighted to find she had won on the £20M Online Spectacular the sum of £1M. However, after contacting Camelot she was told due to ‘technical details’, where numbers had been displayed in the wrong boxes, she ended up with just £10!Mrs. Brennan had spent years wrangling with Camelot with no outcome so decided to take the company to the High Court along with her lawyers. Her lawyers have specified to Camelot to pay out-of-court settlements of £700,000, £800,000, or £900,000.She said, “They took the game offline within a day of me making the claim. They told me in an email it was a glitch.”Claiming, “Software behaved “erroneously” during Joan’s win.”
Camelot Fined over App Glitch
Only last month Camelot was fined £3.15M after a glitch on their National Lottery app where users checking their tickets were told they had not won when in fact they had.20,000 users found their tickets were non-winners after scanning the QR code when they were winners22,000 users who purchased one ticked via the app were charged for two.
Glitch with Animations
Across the top of the £20M Online Spectacular scratch card is a set of numbers, Joan matched two 15s, one from the top row and one from the below numbers awarding a tenner, she then matched two 1s for a million.Joan is suing Camelot for breach of the “monies due under the terms of a contract between the parties and/or breach of a consumer contract.”In Camelot’s defense, they claimed the animations on the £20 Million Online Spectacular scratch card were to blame citing the animations were purely for entertainment value only. The outcome of each Instant win game is pre-determined upon purchase, and only a handful of National Lottery players had been affected when they noticed the glitch.The case is to be heard in the High Court in June 2022, but no date has been set for the trial as yet.