It might sound crazy to those people who check their lottery tickets religiously once the results have been drawn, but sometimes, people forget they have bought a ticket in the first place.
Some staggeringly large prizes are left unclaimed for months, and an untold number of would-be millionaires are wandering around right now, living their day to day lives, not knowing they are missing out on money that could positively impact them and their families for generations to come.
How could this happen, and what becomes of the prize money if it does? Perhaps a more pressing question, is how would someone ever find out they had won if they had forgotten or lost their ticket for some reason?
Well, there are procedures put in place to try and get that money to the rightful winners, and also procedures to make sure no one else comes along and gets hold of it when they shouldn’t.
It’s not always possible to find clueless winners though, especially since they have no idea anyone is looking for them.
Here is everything you need to know about unclaimed lottery prizes in the UK.
Unclaimed Prizes go to Good Causes
It sucks for the person who has won (although they don’t know about it, so they won’t lose any sleep over it), but all money that remains unclaimed for a set period of time do go to good use.
While awaiting a winner, the money is held in trust and accrues interest, and when the cut off point for making claims comes all of it including that interest is given to National Lottery funded projects all over the United Kingdom.
On average, the lottery gives around £34 million to good causes every single week, and any unclaimed money goes towards that.
This is why they have the slogan, “Your numbers make amazing happen”.
Any organisation can make a claim for funding from the National Lottery, big or small, but the Government tell the company how to divvy it up by using categories.
The breakdown is as follows:
- Health, education, environment and charitable causes – 40%
- Sport – 20%
- Arts – 20%
- Heritage – 20%
There have been over 670,000 different organisations that have received lottery funding, but a few examples of beneficiaries include scout huts, local film groups, theatres, youth violence education and awareness groups, teaching life-saving skills to children, allotments, fitness campaigns, boxing gyms, mental health campaigns – absolutely all sorts.
The company running the lottery only take 1% in profit, the rest goes to winners, the Government in lottery duties, or to good causes.
Do the Lottery try to Find Winners Who Don’t Come Forward?
Yes, they really do, although only when it comes to big prizes – they can’t be chasing every Tom, Dick and Harriet in the country who has won the price of a meal deal.
In the UK, we have 180 days (about 6 months) to claim lottery wins before they are given to the good causes as outlined above, but within that time, the lottery takes many steps to find the person who has rightfully won the money.
If nobody has come forward after 2 weeks, the details of the unclaimed money are released, however, any player who think they have won but has lost their ticket has just 30 days to contact the lottery in writing.
After this, the lottery will contact the media, perhaps nationally but certainly in the area where the ticket was bought.
This is to get the word out there and hopefully prompt people in the right location to check their tickets.
They might also plan stunts and get local celebrities or sports teams involved, anything to create a buzz around the fact that someone locally is a millionaire but doesn’t know it yet.
Social media plays also a role, and of course, the National Lottery’s website has all the information on unclaimed prizes too.
The lottery actually has access to information that tells them exactly where and when the winning ticket was bought, so they could just check CCTV cameras and release images, but the problem with that is privacy laws.
Even by publicly announcing when and where the ticket was bought, they are giving away enough information for the winner to be identified, and most winners choose to remain anonymous for understandable reasons.
It’s a balance between finding the winner, and protecting the identity of the winner.
How Much Lottery Money Goes Unclaimed?
The amount of money that goes unclaimed each year might shock you.
Obviously, the numbers will be different from one year to the next, but if we look at 2018 as an example, a total of £125.1 million was left on the table.
Now that will account for lots of little prizes as well as a few big ones, but still – £125.1 million!
That includes money won on all lottery tickets and scratch cards run by Camelot, who were the company running the National Lottery at the time.
This is an accurate figure too, since all sales and claims can be tracked, so they can calculate the exact amount that goes unclaimed.
At the time of writing this article, there are six large prizes still to be claimed. Here they are with the amount of time they have remained unclaimed:
| Game | Amount | Time Waiting |
|---|---|---|
| Euromillions | £1,000,000 | 5.5 months |
| Euromillions | £167,274.40 | 5 months |
| Set for Life | £120,000 | 3.5 months |
| Euromillions | £1,000,000 | 2.5 months |
| Lotto | £1,000,000 | 1 month |
| Euromillions | £1,000,000 | 3 weeks |
That’s just the big money and just for the past 5 or 6 months too – who knows how many smaller amounts have been forgotten about or missed.
Biggest Unclaimed Lottery Prize in the UK
If you looked at the calculations for unclaimed lottery tickets in 2012 instead, the figure would have been way higher.
Want to know why?
Because one lucky and very unlucky player from Stevenage scooped a mega £63.8 million on the EuroMillions, and for some baffling reason, never stepped forward to claim their prize.
This goes down as the biggest ever unclaimed lottery win in the UK ever, but it’s not just us Brits who forget to check our tickets:
| Country | £$€ Lost | Year |
|---|---|---|
| UK | £63.8 Million | 2012 |
| America | $177 Million | 2011 |
| Canada | CAD$14.9 Million | 2006 |
| Ireland | €3.4 Million | 2001 |
| Spain | €4.7 Million | 2012 |
| Germany | €11.3 Million | 2017 |
| Mexico | MEX$146 Million | 2007 |
2012 was a bad year for missing out on becoming millionaires, huh?
Actually, if you allow for exchange rates at the time, that £63.8 million from the UK is also the biggest unclaimed prize in the world.
The next closest was in America in 2011, as we can see from the table above, but in 2012 that £63.8 million would have been worth somewhere in the region of $100.2 million in the US.
You wouldn’t want to know about it if you found out all these years later, would you?
Why Don’t People Claim Lottery Prizes?
People are funny, aren’t they?
They will happily spend a few quid on lottery tickets when they go shopping, but then if they win, they don’t bother claiming their winnings – so why play in the first place?
Well, there are a few different answers, but mainly it comes down to one of the following:
- Forget to check numbers
- Can’t be bothered with smaller prizes
- Lose their ticket
- Don’t understand the game
- They die
The only time someone would willingly ignore a win, is if that win was so minor that it doesn’t warrant the effort.
Buying lottery tickets online counteracts this, as winnings are paid automatically, but if you have a paper ticket you have to take it back to the shop to claim your £2, which is never going to be a priority.
In these situations, the person might just end up forgetting or throwing the ticket out with some other rubbish, and wouldn’t be overly bothered because who gets upset over a few pounds?
If someone forgets to check their number all together or loses their ticket, then they aren’t ignoring the win, they simply don’t know about it. Maybe life got too busy and as the weeks went on they forgot they even bought the ticket in the first place, who knows…
Believe it or not, there are still some people out there who don’t realise that you still win money if you only get a few of the numbers. Yes, there are people who don’t understand what a win is. So if they don’t have all the numbers, they think they haven’t won anything. Crazy, but true.
Lastly, a bit of a sad one, but people die. A lot of elderly people play the lottery, so it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that a fair few biggish winners have been older folk who have bought their weekly tickets, but not lived long enough to see the draw.
There may be other reasons too, but these are the most obvious or common ones.