http://www.euronews.com/ Just imagine. Your wildest dreams have come true. You have won billions on the lottery!
And then you find out...you haven't.
Denmark's state lottery sent e-mails to 300 punters, congratulating them on their astronomical winnings.
However
the messages were a mistake, with far too many zeros on the end. The
real amount won by each punter would not even pay for a weekend away.
"It
is amateurish to send out an e-mail like this," said one disappointed
Dane, Flemming Dahl Jensen. "They mess with people's emotions, sending
people on a rollercoaster. For someone with a heart condition, it could
have been fatal."
The Danske Spil state lottery corrected the error, by e-mail, half an hour later. It blames human error for the blunder.
"We
were about to start our new Eurojackpot lottery, with some very big
prizes," said Danske Spil spokesman Thomas Roersig. "So we were adding
zeros for internal testing and those zeros went out by mistake."
It
is not exactly a riches to rags tale but Denmark's short-lived lottery
billionaires have certainly come down to earth with a bump.