Every year millions of pounds worth of cash prizes are unclaimed in the UK, often due to people losing their lottery ticket, forgetting about secondary prizes or lotto players not properly checking their tickets. And one of these may well be the case for two National Lottery winners, who both could have unknowingly been sitting on a whopping £1 million since January.
The National Lottery have now announced the two unknown winners could miss out on their prize as the deadline to make a claim is only a few weeks away. According to the organisation, the pair of tickets are from the Euromillions European Millionaire Maker raffle that took place on January 21, WalesOnline reports.
The deadline to make a claim is July 20, with one of the winners reportedly coming from Doncaster, South Yorkshire and the other in the Hinckley and Bosworth district of Leicestershire. If you think you live in either area and bought a ticket to the January 21 raffle, you can click here to check if you won online.
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If you played last night's National Lottery EuroMillions, the winning numbers are: 10, 35, 42, 47, 48. The Lucky Stars are: 02, 11. The estimated jackpot is £150 million for the draw which took place last night, on Tuesday June 28. The National Lottery Thunderball winning numbers are: 02, 06, 08, 11, 16. And last night's Thunderball was revealed to be 07.
Numbers Stars Winners Prize:
- 5 2 0 - £0
- 5 1 5 - £125,966.80
- 5 0 6 - £0
- 4 2 32 - £1,432.80
- 4 1 816 - £103.50
- 3 2 1,674 - £53.30
- 4 0 1,737 - £36.10
- 2 2 27,324 - £11.40
- 3 1 35,380 - £9.80
- 3 0 81,596 - £7.90
- 1 2 158,205 - £4.90
- 2 1 549,223 - £4.50
- 2 0 1,272,807 - £3.10
What happens to unclaimed lottery prizes?
In the UK, lottery winners have 180 days to claim their prize - however, if you play the lottery in Ireland, you’ll only have 90 days to claim your prize.
The money set aside for unclaimed lottery prizes typically gets given to the UK National Lottery’s Good Causes Fund, which has supported more than 635,000 projects since the first National Lottery drawback in 1994.
Over £43 billion has been raised for good causes. Notably, the building of the new Wembley Stadium was supported by a substantial National Lottery grant.
Lottery winners in the US also have 180 days to claim their prize, but the fate of funds is different as the money goes into the coffers of the state where the lottery ticket was purchased and can be used however the state sees fit, funding projects such as roads and schools.
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