A lottery company apologized, and its CEO resigned after thousands of players were mistakenly told they’d won life-changing amounts of money.
Norsk Tipping, which oversees the operation of Eurojackpot in Norway, confirmed that the error had occurred when converting prize amounts from euros to the Norwegian krona.
Eurojackpot is a transnational lottery started in 2013 and played by 19 European countries.
According to the BBC, local media reported that, instead of dividing individual winnings by 100, they were multiplied, resulting in massively inflated numbers.
Unfortunately for those who thought they’d hit the literal jackpot, no incorrect winnings were paid out by Norsk Tipping, and the company later apologized for the mix-up.
Lottery apologizes for prize mix-up
“I am terribly sorry that we have disappointed so many, and I understand that people are angry with us,” Norsk Tipping CEO Tonje Sagstuen said in a statement.
Resigning a day after the incident, Sagstuen also confirmed that she had received numerous messages from players detailing how they’d planned to spend the faux winnings.
“I sat down, and it said we had won 980,000 kroner ($97,000)! I had played with two others, and we both had won big prizes,” one woman told VG.
Within minutes, the app she was using corrected the winning amount. “20 minutes later, I get a message that I have won 97 kroner ($10). I went from being a millionaire to having won less than 200 kroner. It felt like the world’s steepest rollercoaster,” she continued.
According to Eurojackpot, the chances of winning the lottery’s grand prize (seven matching numbers) are 1 in 140 million. Smaller amounts can be won for fewer matching numbers.
The latter appears to have been the case here, with Norsk Tipping originally stating that 16,000 people had won varying prize amounts. This number was later corrected to 47,000.
Content shared from www.dexerto.com.