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UK’s Youngest Ever Lottery Winner Wanted To Sue After Her Life Changed Overnight

15:59 27 January 2023

Updated: 01:55 23 November 2024

The UK’s youngest-ever lottery winner says she wanted to sue EuroMillions after her life changed overnight.

The prospect of winning the lottery is something we all dream of.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have that much money to spend?

Well, while one teenage winner was thrilled to realise her dream of becoming a millionaire, she cautions that winning such a fortune isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Watch the UK’s youngest-ever lottery winner talk about wanting to sue after her win…

In the UK, the legal age limit for purchasing lottery tickets was raised to 18 in 2021, having been 16 since 1994.

Jane Park, now 27, says that she actually threatened to sue after her win at age 17 – before the government upped the age limit.

She believes that someone under the age of 18 should never have been allowed to win the jackpot in the first place.

And Park says that while she is ‘still living her best life’ and doesn’t regret any of the money she’s spent, winning the lottery ultimately made her miserable.

She also admits to having trust issues because of how others reacted to her newfound fortune and that she ‘wouldn’t wish a lottery win on anyone’.

Park was encouraged to go public with her win but says that then led to disturbing invasions of her privacy.

She tells Dr Phil: “I had a stalker, there were people hiding inside the bushes outside my house, they were threatening to throw acid in my face.

“I was scared to walk out my front door. I don’t think that anyone should ever feel like that.”

Park says lottery officials quickly pressured her into revealing her win, as her case was so unusual.

“It’s a choice but you’re encouraged to go public, especially when the case is different, so because I was 17 they said it’s almost unheard of, you should tell people.”

Park, however, says she regrets going public with her win to this day.

Following the ‘traumatic’ publicity surrounding her victory, she ended up threatening to take EuroMillions to court.

She argues that her victory should have never been allowed because she was ‘too young’ at the time.

“In the UK, it was 18 to gamble and 16 to play the lottery,” she tells Dr Phil.

“You couldn’t put a pound in a machine or couldn’t go in the shop and buy cigarettes or alcohol, and you couldn’t go into a casino, but you could play the lottery.

“I was basically wanting them to listen, like me calling them up and saying ‘you should raise the age’, they were never going to listen and that is why I went massive with it.

“Since then, that story went very big and they have raised the age to 18 and I feel like I’ve made a massive impact on that.”

Park admits that winning the lottery turned out to be like a ‘dark, twisted fairy tale’.

She says: “It’s a very dark, twisted fairy tale and I think no one actually warns you of it – especially younger people.”

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Cal Gaunt

Editor

Cal is a former content editor at IGV who specialized in writing trending and entertainment news. He previously worked as a news reporter at the Lancashire Telegraph and earned an NCTJ in Sports Journalism.

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