The story began in 2014, but it’s not until 2023 that a couple of EuroMillions winners will finally see justice done after being ripped off by a family member…
Monday, February 13, a couple from Toulouse was sentenced for abuse of weakness on a vulnerable person after setting up a scam whose victims were none other than the uncle and aunt of one of the accused. Indeed, the latter won, in 2014, the tidy sum of 513,000 euros after playing the EuroMillions. A sum that exceeded them, especially since the couple was not in excellent health with on the one hand blindness and on the other a physical handicap. Something to convince them, as soon as they heard the news, to go see their niece living in Haute-Garonne and whose husband is a bank manager. As reported by Sud-Ouest, they even asked the scam couple not to tell the rest of their family about the sum earned.
Rather than help them however, the couple’s niece and her husband hastened to their make an oral pact in order to pocket the majority of the kitty and to leave only a small part of it to the real winners. This is how the couple who won the EuroMillions ended up with 63,000 euros while 450,000 euros went into the pockets of the scammers who had convinced the couple to tell the FDJ that they had played four. With this amount, the crooks built a house which they then rented to the 60something couple for 700 euros per month, a house that the niece wanted to include in her own heritage on the pretext of wanting to help her aunt and uncle and allow them to keep their “social benefits and unemployment benefit“.
Winnings fully refunded
In 2020, this arrangement fell through when the niece and her husband wanted to kick the couple out, a couple who had also discovered that all the money won had been used to pay off the debts of the scammers and to buy them two apartments in Toulouse. It was at this time that the case was taken to court and it was not until February 2023 that the couple who ripped off the winners were sentenced to a fine of 10,000 euros, including 4,000 euros suspended. The house they had built and rented to the sixties has also been confiscated and can be returned to the real winners. Finally they will have to pay 518,550 euros to the defrauded coupleor a refund of all EuroMillions winnings.