THE REGULATOR OF the National Lottery was alerted after one lottery player bought tens of thousands of tickets for Ireland’s biggest ever Lotto draw last year, and won money on 45,000 of the tickets.

It is not known how many tickets in total the individual bought. The cost of the 45,000 winning tickets alone would have been €180,000.

The player bought the tickets for the ‘Must be Won’ lotto jackpot in January 2022 which reached €19.6 million after many consecutive rollovers.

The National Lottery had announced that if there was no outright winner, the full value of the prize would flow down to the winners of the next winning prize tiers.

The 45,000 winning tickets were delivered to the National Lottery HQ on Abbey Street
twelve days before the claims period ended, and they were processed in accordance to “strict protocols and in batches allowing for appropriate checking, counting, and reviewing”.

In total, the prizes amounted to €425,813. The player was paid in full on 3 August last year.

The Regulator of the National Lottery met with the operator, the company PLI, in April of last year over concerns about a “large number of prize claims from individual customers as the last day to claim prizes in respect of the Lotto MBW approached”, minutes of a meeting obtained by The Journal via a freedom of information request show. 

Several cases of individuals submitting a high number of prize claims for the ‘Must be Won’ draw in January of last year caused it to notify the regulator of the matter from a ‘player protection perspective’, due to the multiple instances of individuals purchasing a high number of tickets.

In a separate instance, another player claimed prizes for 500 winning tickets.  

In August, PLI wrote to the regulator to notify them that in March 2022, the claims department was contacted by the “sole claimant” of approximately 45,000 winning tickets from the ‘Must be Won’ draw of 15 January 2022. 

The letter shows that PLI carried out “due diligence” in requesting documentation from the claimant, and carried out discussions with the individual, before processing the claims as normal. 

PLI’s player protection team also looked into the instance, and were satisfied that the prize winner was not “playing beyond their means”.

The regulator’s Head of Legal and Compliance advised PLI that although the 45,000 tickets were “bearer instruments”, the company had to satisfy itself that there was “no fraud before the tickets were ‘winning tickets’”. 

The player did not win the jackpot, and in its correspondence PLI noted that not all of the 45,000 winning tickets were attached to “high value” prizes. 

The ‘Must be Won’ draw in January of last year came after a near six months wait for a top prize winner to claim the Lotto jackpot. 

The top prize for the Lotto jackpot is capped at €19.06 million. The must-win aspect of the draw was introduced by the National Lottery after it faced mounting public criticism over the seemingly unwinnable jackpot that kept rolling over. 

Two matching numbers are needed as a minimum for a Lotto ticket to be worth a prize claim. Some prizes can amount to just a few euros.