Why do people who win the lottery tell the newspapers? [Money does not make you happy]

Maybe we’re just cynical but the last thing we would do after beating the odds of 1 in 45 million, would be to tell everyone in the country that our bank account was full and ready for spending…. surely it just opens you up to hassle from people wanting money from you?

I understand we’ve probably all got a list of people we might share the information with / want to financially support but there has to be a line somewhere, surely? Is it because people want to become famous from it? or do you think they’re just naive thinking that Camelot want to support them when actually Camelot just have their own agenda of getting good publicity = more future players?

Jane Park, who won £1,000,000 quotes this quote in the documentary below and we guess she has a point but after 20 goes surely it becomes boring?

Interestingly there seems to be a certain amount that makes the press interested, anything less than £2M doesn’t seem that newsworthy however that still doesn’t stop the Camelot press wagon kicking in and setting up press conferences for anyone who wins over £500,000 and amazingly news outlets still pick up on these with the same boring story of “Oh I couldn’t believe it, I told my family and they didn’t believe it, I rang the claim number and I still couldn’t believe it, it was difficult deciding what to do with the money, I went on holiday and now I will take a few months to think about what to do with my future and finally the statement that everyone cares about I will / I will not keep my job”

Julie Jeffrey, 50, from Hertfordshire, who won £1 million on the lottery in 2002, told Yahoo! News: “I went public for the same reason the majority of people do –  there is nowhere to hide. Even if you only tell one person, things spread. Before you know it everybody knows. And if you don’t take publicity, Camelot can’t acknowledge your existence, so they can’t help you or provide a back up.” however later on she goes on to say “We only got one [begging] letter, it was a congratulations card from my husband’s best friend with a list of things he wanted! I think it was a joke!” presumably this was due to her win being fairly small in comparison to the £161million won by Colin and Christine Weir who had so many begging letters they had to leave the country and go and live in Spain…

17-year-old Jane Park who won £1,000,000 in 2013 still gets hate tweets etc

A spokesman from Camelot says: “Opting for publicity allows the lottery winner to enjoy ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ but it does mean that the world knows exactly who they are, and that can lead to them receiving begging letters and other types of unwanted attention.”

The problem is if you decide to not go public then you will get no help from the Camelot press office, this almost feels like a sort of blackmail to us. In other words if the press pick up on the story for some reason you wouldn’t get Camelot piping up and potentially putting a positive spin on your story, however how many articles have you seen that single out a lottery winner and show how they’ve wasted all the money…. oh wait! But I wonder if those people who wasted it all ‘publicly’ were the same people that stepped up at the beginning for their ’15 minutes of fame’?

If I decided to keep it private, who would be told?

Camelot states “If they [the winner] have requested to remain anonymous, Camelot takes its obligations and duty of care to protect winners’ privacy very seriously. Unless a winner agrees to take full publicity and signs an agreement to that effect, no information about them can be released by Camelot into the public domain.” so it’s just down to you how well you can keep the secret / not let it get to you?

OK 10ways, bored now? Any deals on lottery?

You can often get a totally free lottery ticket / Euromillions ticket here or a buy 1 get 1 free deal on this link (will depend on what deal they’re running this week)

The BBC show ‘Teenage Millionaire: The Year I Won the Lottery’ is live on BBC iPlayer until 14th August 2015

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p02b5stt/teenage-millionaire-the-year-i-won-the-lottery

Currently on BBC iPlayer (ends 14th August 2015)