Everyone has heard stories about people winning a huge amount of money in the lottery. However, sometimes a huge prize remains unclaimed. The winning being forgotten is not very rare each year, thousands of jackpot winners fail to show up at an award ceremony.

This is not surprising as, unlike online casino system, lotteries require players to keep their winning tickets and constantly check the list of winners and some people fail to do it for different reasons.

Here are the 5 examples of the life-changing sums being left unclaimed due to a simple misfortune:

Mega Millions

Imagine yourself finding out that you forgot to check if your ticket is the winning one. It would be a disaster, wouldn’t it?

On December 24, 2002, a $68 million jackpot should’ve been presented to a lucky player. However, the person who bought the winning ticket never showed up. After searching through the whole New York area, the organizers failed to find the winner. Thus, an enormous sum of money was never claimed.

The things could be even worse as the Mega Millions lottery is known for having raffled off a second biggest prize pool of all times – the $656 million jackpot was hit in 2012.

It’s still not known if the person lost the ticket or simply forgot about it. Let’s just hope he or she will never find out what opportunity they missed.

UK National Lottery

Sometimes there is more than one winner who fails to pick up their prize.

In 2006 a £1,666,667 ($2 289 529) jackpot should have been shared between the two lucky ones, however, it never happened. The lottery organizers managed to trace back the winning tickets – one of them was purchased in Glasgow, Scotland, while another one was sold in the English Warwickshire county shop.

Unfortunately for the players, the millionaire-making prize wasn’t picked up before the deadline and got terminated.

Mega Millions, again

Four years after Mega Millions lottery failed to present the $68 million jackpot, another huge amount of money has been left untouched.

On August 1, 2006, another ticket for a barely imaginable 31 million of US dollars was purchased in New York. However, nobody came forward to claim it. The organizers came up with a number of potential reasons for the lack of the winner, such as ticket loss, bad memory, or that the ticket was purchased by a foreign tourist.

Whatever the reason is, a failure to pick up a life-altering prize will definitely go down in history as one of the most painful twists ever – the odds of winning at Mega Millions is equal to 175,711,536 to 1, which is thousand times bigger, than at Stakers Online Casino, for example.

The one thing is for sure – unawareness of the fail is a bliss for the mysterious winner.

£6.9 Million loss

There is a strange story about a mysterious ticket owner, who was lucky enough to win £6.9 Million. Still, it seems like he or she didn’t have enough luck to pick it up.

The 2007 EuroMillions lottery winner came forward to the lottery organizers only not to claim the prize. The company posted the player’s story on their official website. According to them, the lucky one told the organizers about buying a month’s worth of tickets while staying in the UK. He later got back to the United States, put his ticket under the PC keyboard, and forgot about the lottery.

Later, as he remembered to check who was the winner, he found himself on the list. Unfortunately, when he got to the keyboard, he couldn’t find the winning ticket. It was too late to claim the ticket as stolen and the jackpot was lost.

Largest EuroMillions unclaimed jackpot ever

2012 EuroMillions draw had the biggest unclaimed prize of the tremendous sum of £64 million was never claimed.

The jackpot-winning ticket was tracked down to the Stevenage and Hitchin area. The organizers tried their best in searching the ticket buyer. However, even the town crier wasn’t able to reach him. Finally, as the time went past the deadline, the pool was announced to be unclaimed. A potential millionaire never showed up.

Fortunately, lotteries all over the world are starting to look up to online games providers and are moving to the Internet. Soon, the number of heartbreaking money claim fails will decrease.

EDITOR’s NOTE: This is a sponsored article