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RSS feedsIt could have been you. And if it was, you might not have had the payout you deserved because of problems with software powering the UK's National Lottery.
Camelot, the national lottery operator, has admitted that bugs in code provided by US firm Gtech, a former shareholder in Camelot, may have reduced the payouts to some lottery players. Lottery regulator the National Lottery Commission says the fault occurred from November 1994 to July 1998.
The snag has only now come to light, yet seems to have been detected by Gtech two years ago. "We were formally informed by the National Lottery Commission this week about an alleged fault in the UK lottery software which was allegedly found by Gtech in June 1998. We were not aware there had been a problem with the software until the Commission informed us of this allegation," admitted Camelot in a prepared statement.
Fluctuations in power to in-store lottery terminals are blamed for the glitch. The terminals transmit a message via satellite to the lottery central computer every time a ticket is sold, and get a message back authorising the sale. But in cases where there was a fluctuation in the power supply, the terminal did not receive the response from the central computer, and sent the message again, duplicating sales on the main system.
As a result, in cases where the duplicated numbers were winning numbers, the system would divide prize money between more winners than really existed, cutting the shares of real winners. Phantom sales may also have meant that retailers have lost out, because Camelot would have charged them for a sale that didn't take place. The problem only affected payouts of less than £50,000.
First appeared in Computing
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