A lottery seller in Spain who tried to steal a customer's winnings has finally received a prison sentence 14 years after the incident. The seller's lie—hiding the win and telling the customer the ticket was a "loser"—was exposed by digital evidence including the lottery scan records, and the true owner of the long-disputed prize was belatedly identified.
According to Reuters and Spanish local media on Friday, a court in A Coruña, northwestern Spain, sentenced a lottery seller who tried to steal a customer's winnings to three years and six months in prison after finding him guilty of aggravated fraud.
The case dates back to 2012. At the time, a man visited a lottery shop to check whether several tickets he had bought were winners. While checking the tickets, the seller discovered that one ticket for "Primitiva"—Spain's flagship lottery, in which players match six numbers from 1 to 49—had won 4.7 million euros. That was a sum worth about 6.8 billion won at the exchange rate at the time, equivalent to about 8.2 billion won in current value.
But the seller did not disclose the win and deceived the customer by saying there were "no winning tickets." He then claimed to have found the ticket by chance at the shop he ran and attempted to collect the prize himself.
The lottery authorities found this suspicious and withheld payment of the prize, freezing the winnings until the true owner could be identified. Even so, the seller reportedly demanded payment of the prize for years afterward, claiming he was the rightful owner.
During the trial, the seller pleaded not guilty, claiming he had found the ticket on the counter while alone in the shop and had claimed the prize because no owner came forward.
The court, however, did not accept this, citing records from the lottery sales machine. When the winning ticket was first scanned, several other tickets were checked alongside it, and the same number combinations were later confirmed to have been used in subsequent draws. From this, the court concluded that the customer had been with the seller at the time, and that the seller had intentionally concealed the win after becoming aware of it.
Police, who launched an investigation in 2018, also conducted a large-scale search to find the ticket's true owner. About 300 people claimed to be the owner of the winning ticket, but all turned out to be false.
After the investigation, police found a local resident who had bought lottery tickets using the winning number combination over a long period. But he had already died in 2014. He passed away without even knowing he had won. His wife and daughter attended the subsequent trial.
The court ordered that the full prize be paid to the man's heirs in accordance with his will. The ruling, however, has not yet been finalized, and the seller may appeal to a higher court.
Local media reported that "one of the longest disputes over lottery winnings in Spanish judicial history is finally nearing a conclusion," describing it as "a case in which a single lie led to a 14-year courtroom battle."
