He has until Thursday to pocket his jackpot. After midnight, it will be too late. And the lucky guy will become fish ... very fortunately, without knowing it. According to our information, the player who validated his EuroMillions grid on May 22 in Charente-Maritime and won € 1 million in the My Million complementary draw, had still not made himself known on Tuesday.
On August 10, the Française des jeux (FDJ) launched a search notice to try to find the person with the code ND 876 19 04 drawn at random from among several million other combinations. A call for now without result. Usually, the gamblers of the FDJ have 60 days from the draw to claim their pépets. But due to the health crisis, the payment deadline has been extended by 30 days. Our mysterious client from Nouvelle-Aquitaine is therefore entitled to 90 days to give a sign of life. Unless he wants to have fun with the rules and his nerves, he is not aware of his fortune fallen from the sky and which risks slipping out of his hands.
It would really take a miracle to get it out of the woods at the last minute. If so, it would enter the hexagonal annals of gambling. So far, the waiting record is 56 days. In 2012, two septuagenarians from the North, victorious of 3.5 million euros in the Loto, had thus waited eight weeks before discovering that they were the happy owners of the ticket that all the Ch'tis dreamed of owning. More recently, in the spring of 2019, a 50-year-old from Lyon, who had found his My Million receipt stored in his glove compartment, had himself made the suspense last for 53 days before being able to cash his big check for 1 million euros.
Not everyone was so lucky. Since the birth, in February 2014, of the My Million raffle associated with the EuroMillions grid, no less than 30 jackpots of 1 million euros have not found a taker out of a total of 823 (including the draw for this Tuesday evening), or 3.6% of jackpots without a winner. A higher percentage than that recorded in the Loto which is more of the order of 2%. With twelve distracted in ten months, 2014 was the richest year of misfires.
What happens to unclaimed money?
And for good reason, it was the launch of My Million: some players still checked the winning numbers of EuroMillions but omitted the combination that could also bring big My Million. The pace of forgetting has slowed down with practice - the last gain definitely lost dates back to April 2019 - but there are always heads in the air. With two unclaimed lots each, Seine-et-Marne, Val-de-Marne, Bouches-du-Rhône, Drôme and Nord are the most dazed departments in France.
But then what becomes of this uncredited money in the account of the millionaire who ignored himself? "It is kept by the FDJ and put back into play in the form of promotional operations, through discount coupons for the players", explains one within the operator. The so-called rank 1 unclaimed prizes (jackpots in a way) of the drawing games suffer the same fate. On the other hand, the intermediate gains which do not find a taker before the deadline are, them, transferred to the State since mid-November, within the framework of the Pacte law and its section overhaul of the taxation of gambling. The misfortune of some makes the happiness of the public funds.
