Danish lottery ‘accidentally’ announces billionaire lottery winners
Denmark's national lottery company Danske Spil accidentally sent emails to hundreds of customers congratulating them on being billionaire lottery winners.
Local media like Politiken and TV2 Nord reported that 300 people were mistakenly contacted.
AFP says that the winners indulged in dreams of champagne and caviar for about an hour and a half until the error was discovered.
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"Three hundred of our lottery players who won the lottery, the Keno, received a message saying they had won a sum in the billions. And they never won that amount," the Danske Spil spokesman Thomas Roersig is quoted as saying.
Roersig said that many of the winners were angry and disappointed by the error, but most took it well.
He added: "We are of course very sorry. We have now written to them to inform them of the sum that they really won."
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The news agency says one of the winners, Flemming Dahl told the Nordjyske newspaper that he got an e-mail informing him he had won the equivalent of US$3.8 billion.
"My heart leapt and I started thinking of all the things I was going to do with the money: take my family on holiday, buy a new house, a new car," he reportedly told the site.
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