Mystery of the €4.7 million lottery ticket 

POLICE have told a court that a lottery shop owner may have deliberately deceived a customer out of a winning ticket worth €4.7 million. 

The case goes back seven years when the shop owner in A Coruña, Galicia, handed in the Primitiva ticket to the Provincial Delegation of Lotteries in the city. 

He accompanied it with a letter explaining that he had found the ticket just outside the security glass of the shop “in impeccable condition, as if just out of the machine” and, passing it through the machine, had verified that it was a winning ticket. 

However, it may actually have all started the day before. The police report states that the lottery shop owner could be trying to hide a deception where he had checked the ticket along with three others. One of them had a small prize which was paid out. But the major prize ticket was also checked and no one has ever claimed it despite a receipt being issued telling the owner to go to the lotteries delegation. 

Police say the timings are contradictory to the story claimed by the shop owner, and suggest his motive to be that he would stand to claim the prize in no owner is found. 

So far 270 people have claimed to be the legitimate owner of the ticket and several have gone to court to try to prove it. 

So far none have succeeded. This police report has been made as part of one of those court cases.