Thousands of Norwegians were alerted to huge lottery wins last Friday, only to find out three days later that their winnings were actually massively smaller than first thought.
A total of 47,000 people were shot a text just before the weekend with an alert about big lottery prize wins in Norway. Many of them were celebrating their windfalls, and they had a weekend to party. But, as Monday came around, so did a heartbreaking second message.
Norsk Tipping had made a terrible mistake in its calculations. The lottery in question was the Eurojackpot, which is paid out in Eurocents. In the conversion to Norwegian kroner, instead of the winnings being divided by 100, they were multiplied by 100.
This led 47,000 people to get wildly inaccurate reports of how much they had won in the lottery. Winnings went from a million kroner to a hundred in just a weekend. It was devastating for many who had already planned what to spend their lottery winnings on.
Lottery CEO Resigns, And Winners Are Resigned To Meager Payouts
Many Norwegians were left disappointed after a week of celebrating a big lottery win, only to have their dreams shattered. Talk about a bad Monday. Ole Fredrik Sveen, 53, believed they had won 1.2 million kroner ($119,831). However, they found out on Monday that it only came to 125 kroner ($12.50).
“At first, you’re ecstatic and happy about the message you got, that says you won 1.2 million kroner,” he told The Guardian. “You could have been really unlucky and spent a large amount of money, then found out it wasn’t true,” he said. “But thankfully we kept our heads cool and realised it wasn’t meant to be this time either.”
But, he’s not let it get him down. “You don’t get too much champagne for that money. It’s more like a glass of prosecco or crémant than champagne,” he said.
As a result of the huge mess up, CEO Tonje Sagstuen has stepped down from her position. As a show of respect to the thousands of people who believed they had huge winnings on the lottery, she’s resigned.