Imagine the joy of being notified of a huge lottery win. What would be the first thing you’d do? Get the champagne in? Book a fancy vacation? Call your boss and tell him where to go?
And then imagine being informed that the notification had, in fact, been sent in error. Well, you can always send the booze back and cancel the holiday, but trying to convince your boss that you were just joking … well, that may be a bigger challenge.
In an awful turn of events, several thousand people in Norway were told via text messages and push notifications that they’d won “excessively high” prizes in last Friday’s Eurojackpot draw. Except that they hadn’t.
Norsk Tipping, Norway’s state-owned gambling operator, had to contact the winners again to tell them that it had made a terrible mistake after a manual coding error inflated the value of their winning prizes.
In a press release shared online, Norsk Tipping explained that it always receives the prize amounts from Germany in euro cents, and then converts them to Norwegian kroner as Norway doesn’t use the euro currency.
“It was during this conversion that a manual error was made in the code that is entered into our game engine,” Norsk Tipping said, adding that instead of being divided by 100, the winning amounts had been multiplied by 100. Which means that instead of splashing out on a new car, the winners would, more likely, be able to splash out on a new air freshener for their current vehicle. If they have one.
Norsk Tipping said that the process of sending out prizes began at about 3:15 a.m local time, and was confirmed completed at about 4:30 a.m., with SMS and push notifications sent to customers who had consented to receiving such messages.
While no payouts were made, Norsk Tipping CEO Tonje Sagstuen deemed the error serious enough for her to quit her post on Saturday.
“I’ve received many messages from people who had managed to make plans for holidays, buying an apartment or redecorating before they realized that the amount was wrong,” Sagstuen said in comments reported by Euronews. “To them I can only say: I’m sorry! But I understand that it’s little consolation.”
The Guardian tracked down one of the winners, a guy called Sveen who teaches at a culinary school in Oslo. He received a message telling him he’d won 1.2 million kroner ($120,000), but it turned out he’d only won a paltry 125 kroner ($12.50).
Despite the disappointment, Sveen said he would still celebrate, though he admitted that “you don’t get too much champagne for that money. It’s more like a glass of prosecco or crémant than champagne.”
