A husband and wife from Spain who schemed to swindle a lottery winner out of over €11 million (US$12 million) have been handed a three-year prison sentence by a judge in Valencia. The couple, bar owners in Pedralba, a small town near Valencia, were also ordered to pay the misappropriated funds to the victim in restitution.
The victim, a regular at the couple’s bar, had purchased her weekly lottery tickets from them. On March 12, 2017, she bought three tickets for Spain’s Lotería Nacional Father’s Day draw and entrusted them to the bar owners for safekeeping, a common practice among the regulars.
The victim always bought three tickets, two of which had the same numbers each week: 10,123 and 12,396. The third ticket would always feature a random number, which on that particular week was 39,813. Interestingly, the same number was also picked on a joint ticket by the bar owners and one of their friends, as well as by another regular at the bar who also entrusted their ticket to the owners.
Lotería Nacional operates with five-digit ticket numbers ranging from 00000 to 99999, and each number is printed multiple times across several series, each with its unique number acting as a bonus ball. To win the big jackpot, known as “el gordo,” players need to match both the ticket number and the series number drawn. Matching only the ticket number but missing the series number results in smaller prizes.
The draw on March 18, 2017, revealed 39,813 as a winner for all four players at the bar. However, only the victim’s ticket had the correct series number to win the €14.8 million (US$16 million) jackpot. The other two tickets each won €130,000.
The bar owners contacted the victim and asked her to come to the bar. When she arrived, they locked the door to prevent anyone else from entering and showed her the three winning tickets. Although they realized she held the jackpot ticket, they falsely claimed the tickets had been mixed up and it was impossible to determine the actual winner.
Insisting that the fairest solution would be to split the prize four ways, the couple persuaded the confused victim to agree. They then informed the other two winners, who were unaware of the scheme, that the prize would be split.
A lawyer was brought in to draft a formal agreement detailing the four-way distribution of the prizes, which the victim signed. However, after convicting the couple of fraud, the judge ruled that the victim had been misled into believing she did not know which ticket was the winner and was therefore entitled to the full prize.
Lawyers for the victim criticized the case’s duration, which lasted six years, as “remarkably excessive” given its “low complexity.”
