£58M EuroMillions Winner Has Less Than a Week to Claim

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The winner of a £58 million EuroMillions jackpot has less than seven days to claim the prize or risk losing the money forever. The jackpot was won nearly six months ago and despite reports that someone had come forward to claim it, the prize money has still not been paid out.

£58 Million Jackpot At Risk

The jackpot was won in the EuroMillions draw on Tuesday 17th March and was worth £57,869,670. It is the second-biggest jackpot to be won in the UK so far this year, behind the £58.3 million jackpot that was claimed in April.

After two weeks without a claim, the National Lottery put out an appeal to ticket holders and revealed that the March jackpot was won by someone who bought their entry in South Ayrshire in Scotland. A couple of weeks later - in the same weekend that the April jackpot was won - a claim was made.

The jackpot, however, has not been paid out, despite the National Lottery confirming that someone stepped forward to claim it. There are only two possibilities: the claim was not a valid one or the winner did not have their ticket so could not be paid out immediately. 

If the winning ticket has been lost, the prize may still be paid out. The winner would have had to contact the National Lottery within 30 days of the winning draw - which appears to have happened in this instance - and then the claim will be investigated. If the claim can be verified without the winning ticket, the prize will be paid out at the end of the 180-day claim period.

The alternative is that the claim lodged back in April was not a valid one and the claimant did not have a winning ticket. In that case, the jackpot will go down as one of the UK’s biggest ever unclaimed prizes.

Biggest Unclaimed Lottery Prizes

The title of biggest ever unclaimed prize goes to a £63.8 million EuroMillions jackpot from June 2012. After two weeks without a claimant coming forward, the National Lottery revealed that the winning ticket was purchased in the Stevenage and Hitchin area of Hertfordshire.

As the 180-day claim deadline approached, efforts were stepped up to find the ticket holder. Posters were put up in the area and the National Lottery deployed the Guinness World Records’ loudest town crier in Stevenage to raise awareness of the unclaimed prize.

Despite these efforts, the winner did not step forward to claim, so the sum of £63,837,543.46 was allocated to the National Lottery’s Good Causes fund, as are all unclaimed prizes. If the unclaimed £58 million jackpot is not claimed by the end of Sunday, that too will be used to fund good causes.

Why doesn’t the National Lottery reveal the shop where the winning ticket was sold?

All National Lottery winners in the UK have the right to remain anonymous, and in order to protect this anonymity the National Lottery has to be cautious about what information is released to the public about winning tickets.

As a result, the rough area in which a ticket was bought can be disclosed, but the exact shop from which it was bought cannot be revealed. The National Lottery has previously stated that it can publicly disclose the location of the winning ticket within an area of around 100,000 people. To pinpoint it any further would be against the terms of its license agreement, it has said. It also reminded players that it is their responsibility to keep winning tickets safe and to notify the National Lottery of any claims.

Go to the How to Claim page if you need to learn more about the claim process, or view the Lost Tickets page if you think you may have misplaced a winning ticket and want to know what to do next.