A man from Bovensmilde was prevented from claiming a prize from the Post Code Lottery.
Translation by Traci White
During the Kofferjacht lottery game, where the first person to find a hidden suitcase wins 1,000 euros, a man named Dennis from the Drenthe town of Bovensmilde says that he was restrained and prevented from claiming the prize.
Dennis told RTV Drenthe that his wife, who was watching a live stream, contacted him when she recognised the petrol station where the suitcase was hidden. Dennis says that he was in the area, so he drove over to the site. When he spotted several Post Code Lottery vehicles at the petrol station, he knew he was in the right place.
When he tried to walk over to pick up the suitcase, he says that Post Code Lottery employees stopped him and asked for his personal information before letting him claim the suitcase. Dennis says that another person was instructed to run over and pick up the case, and when Dennis tried to run after him, security personnel on site held him back.
Against the rules
The way it all went down seemed wrong to Dennis, who says that according to the Post Code Lottery rules, the idea behind the Kofferjacht game is that a person first touches the suitcase and then has their contact information collected. The lottery organisation has now publicly acknowledged that the situation in Assen was wrong and will be giving Dennis and the person who claimed the suitcase 1,000 euros each.
The Post Code Lottery is a nation-wide lottery which hands out winnings to every person who bought a ticket in a particular post code each year. The lottery was founded in 1989 and gives 50 percent of its proceeds to charity: in 2017, the organisation distributed 371 million euros among 95 good causes. Eastermar in Friesland won the annual prize in January of 2018, which has 1,165 inhabitants: 25 percent of the people living in that post code bought lottery tickets and are splitting 26.95 million euros amongst themselves.
