Bar Ownes Try to Swindle Lottery Winner out of $16M, Go to Jail

A fairly straightforward case took six years to resolve in Spain, shrouded in anonymity, but painting compelling details of an attempt to swindle the victim gone wrong. Spanish media sources have reported the case of a woman who was a regular at a bar in Valencia, and who would buy three lottery tickets every week.

Bar Owners Thought to Concoct a Seemingly Fool-Proof Scheme

The woman would visit the same bar, purchase the lottery tickets, and then leave them with the couple for safekeeping, which is a standard practice. The lottery game she was playing was the Lotería Nacional Father’s Day draw, which she won, entitling her to a €14.8 million payday.

This would not have been unusual, but the bar owners had ended up selecting the exact same numbers on that occasion – 39,813. As a clarification, Lotería Nacional asks players to pick anything from 00000 to 99999 and to win the jackpot, you ought to match all five numbers precisely.

The victim did, and staggeringly – so did the bar owners who realized that they had won the jackpot just as well as had the anonymous woman. On top of that, another person who was regular at the bar had also used the exact same number. Four people had picked 39,813, it seemed, out of 100,000 unique possible combinations in the same location.

The incredulity of this coincides aside, it turned out that only the victim’s ticket had the correct serial numbers, which qualified it for the “el gordo,” or “the big one,” referring to the multi-million jackpot worth €14.8 million or some $16 million. The other tickets were only entitled to around €130,000 ($140,000) each.

The couple was not sure what to do, so they decided to try and convince the victim that all the tickets had been confused. They called in the victim and said that the three tickets – the one owned by the couple, the one by the other regular at the bar, and the victim, had all been mixed up and there was no way to tell which one was which in the end.

They suggested that a fair solution would be to split the jackpot between the four people involved, although technically, it was only three parties – the bar owners bought one ticket after all. The ticket owned by the couple supposedly involved a fifth person – a friend of theirs who was playing with them.

The Victim Eventually Gets the Swindlers

Regardless, the victim finally acquiesced and agreed to sign a legal contract drafted by a lawyer which saw the prize split in the suggested way. However, the victim later sued the couple, although the details of this are not immediately clear.

The case dates back to 2017, but it was only resolved recently, as reported by media outlets. The upshot is that the couple had been successfully sentenced for fraud, and they are now heading to serve three-year prison sentences. They will also have to repay the victim. It’s not immediately clear what will happen with the other party that had split the prize and whether the two will be deemed eligible for returning the money.