Keeping Your Lottery Ticket Safe

Every year millions of pounds of lottery prizes go unclaimed through players forgetting to check their tickets, not checking them properly or losing them.

The safe keeping of a lottery ticket is solely the responsibility of the owner. Should your ticket be lost, stolen or destroyed, players are able to make put in a written claim to the Lottery Operators Camelot, within 30 days of a winning draw date. Whether the claim is looked into and any prize paid out, is entirely down to the discretion of Camelot.

Here we have put together some tips to help you make sure that should you be lucky enough to have a winning ticket, then your prize won’t go unclaimed

Always Sign Your Tickets

Whenever you purchase a lottery ticket through a National Lottery retailer, always fill in your name, address, postcode and signature on the back. If you were subsequently to lose your ticket, you could at least be assured that nobody else could claim and prize associated with that ticket.

Have A Regular ‘Safe Place’

We are all creatures of habit which can sometimes be a bad thing as well as a good thing. Having a regular ‘safe place’ for your lottery ticket makes you less likely to lose your ticket. Here are some of the most popular ‘safe places’:

Wallet/purse
Handbag compartment
Tea caddy
Car glove box

These are all quite common, but the ‘safe places’ used by those players that discover they have a winning ticket, are far from usual. Read our lottery winners facts

Checking Your Ticket

Assuming you firstly remembered to get a ticket, and secondly, managed to keep it safe, now you have to check it to see if it’s won. There are many ways in which you can check to see if your ticket has won.

Watch the draw live on TV
Check in the newspapers
Go online
Sign up to our free Lottery Results Email Service

Whichever method you use to check your ticket, be sure to double check it, and if it’s a EuroMillions ticket, don’t forget to check to see if you’ve won the Millionaire Raffle.

Never Miss A Draw Or A Win

The only guaranteed way to make sure that you never forget to enter a lottery draw, never lose a ticket and never miss out on a win, is to play online.

Play online and you can arrange continuous entries into the Lotto and Lotto Plus 5 draws with funds being regularly debited from your bank by the National Lottery operators to cover the cost. With Thunderball, EuroMillions and Lotto HotPicks, you can enter for the same number of consecutive weeks as you can on a payslip from a lottery retailer. Online players are given notice as to when their tickets have expired so they can go back to their online account and buy some more.

The most important feature of buying your lottery tickets online is that you will never miss out if your numbers come up. Online winners automatically have their accounts credited with any prizes they win and are advised by email.

Improve Your Odds Of Winning

There is only one way that you can improve your odds of winning any lottery, and that is to buy more tickets. If you buy 1 EuroMillions ticket, the odds against winning are approximately 1 in 116 million. Buy 2 tickets and those odds are 1 in 58 million. Buy 20 tickets and the odds go down to less than 6 million.