What happens if you win the big one at Lotto tonight?

We all love to dream about how we’ll spend a Lotto win – buy a house, pay off a mortgage, take a world trip, help the kids out, give to charity, book a flight into space, buy some passionfruit …

Planning how we’ll spend the $23 million that’s up for grabs in Lotto this Saturday night is a feel-good thing to do, albeit a waste of time (or maybe not). But what do you do when you actually see your numbers come up? What happens next?

More Fm’s Jay-Jay Feeney and Paul “Flynny” Flynn had a chat with the Lotto person in charge of winners, as it were – Lucy Fullerton, the head of Lotto winner experience.

Fullerton says if you are playing online, her team will get in touch with you. “You will be sent a link to a prize claim form, and you fill that out online, and it goes straight through to our prize payment team, and they can pay your prize,” she says.

“But if it’s the big one, we will get in touch with you before the money comes through, just to give you that support and guidance.

“If you have a physical ticket there are two things you can do – either take it into your local store and they can give you a prize claim form to fill out, which is then couriered to us. But a lot of people don’t actually want to do that because they want to stay anonymous, and you might go to your local store all the time.”

So Fullerton says you may prefer to get in touch with the Lotto team and go to head office (Newmarket, Auckland), where they can sort it out for you directly.

‘Most people just want a glass of water and a cup of tea’

Fullerton tells Flynny, yes there is a special room for winners. You can have champagne if you want, but not many people do. “Most people just want a glass of water and a bit of a cup of tea, and someone to talk to.”

Jay-Jay wants to know what state they’re in. “They usually haven’t eaten anything and they haven’t slept much,” Fullerton says. “It’s a funny thing. They are often in shock, in a good way. They’re over the moon. But the thing I’ve realised, since starting this job is that we’re the only people, really, they can talk to about it. We have no personal interest at all in the money.

“So they do just really open up to us.”

‘Will my local branch know I have won?’

Flynny asks whether his bank might get worried seeing such a large sum going in. But it turns out there is a delegated person at every bank’s head office to handle this, and the Lotto staff put the winners in touch with this person at their bank.

“That person can actually take their bank account, lift it out of a local branch and put it into head office, and nobody knows it’s happened. It means when the money lands in there, the local branch is not alerted.”

With every big draw, of course there are many more people buying tickets. “Every time the jackpot climbs higher we see more people come in.”

And Fullerton says there is no “lucky” way to buy your ticket – whether you choose the numbers yourself or get the computer to do it for you, it makes no difference to your odds of winning.

You have the same chance no matter how you buy (or choose) your numbers.

It all just comes down to how those balls fall.