If you think choosing the correct winning lottery ticket numbers makes you clever or different from the rest, check out these lucky few:

The Britows, of the 1st Scout Troop of Devon, hit a £15 million jackpot in 2004 as they were facing redundancy. The group used their winnings to go on a two week wilderness holiday in Canada before buying up the local land around their base in order to protect themselves from greedy developers.

Peter Lavery, won £10.2 million on the lottery/">National Lottery in 1996 and used to money to buy a whiskey distillery, which makes his favourite brand ‘Danny Boy’. Lavery failed to splash out in any other extravagant way.

John McGinnues, won £10 Million in 1997 and ploughed the lot of it into his beloved Livingstone Football Club. The football club duly sank and took John with it. McGinnues is now £2 million in debt.

Eric and Sue Tarry of Fakenham played the same numbers on the lottery for years. One week, Mr Fakenham forgot the numbers when going to buy their tickets. He used the lucky dip instead and won a vast £7.6 million.

Michael Carroll, the self-named ‘King of the Chavs’, won £9.7 million in 2002 and managed to blow it all on poor property purchases, drugs, cars, and wild parties. Carroll was sent to prison for fighting in public and within 18 months was down to his last £500,000. He attempted suicide in 2011.

Stan and Pat Cable, won £4 million in 2011 when their lottery ticket numbers came in but still haven’t moved from their two-bed council flat in Suffolk. The Cable’s say the reason they have not moved is because they like their neighbours too much!

Michael Egglestone, won £2.7 million on the lottery/">National Lottery and used the money to pay for his triple bypass surgery, as well as shelling of £8,000 on a second hand Robin Reliant for himself!

The British lottery/">National Lottery has long been plagued by a variety of different scams. These scams range from letters through your door to phoney telephone calls to emails sent to gather bank account information from unsuspecting individuals so that they can drain your accounts unawares.

All too often elderly people are the targets of these scams, being particularly susceptible to these types of frauds, especially, it has to be said, where technology is involved.

A recent scam has been doing the rounds of email in-boxes so I will break it down for you here so you know how it works and how to avoid being conned.

According to the email, which has been in circulation since November, 2011, the recipient has won up to £1,500,000 in the British lottery/">National Lottery Promo Programme. It claims that your email address has been attached to the winning numbers of a draw and that you need to contact the ‘fiduciary agent’ Mr. Richard Cook to officially claim the prize.

The ‘winner’ is also asked to submit a ‘Verification/Fund Release Form’ which requests name and contact details and other personal information. This email is not from the lottery/">National Lottery. Once you have sent over details and invested time in filling out boring documents, they will ask you to pay some upfront fees needed to cover legal costs, transfer fees, insurance, and any other imaginary costs they can think of. If you do pay these fees you are unlikely to ever see that money again.

It is possible that the scammers may also attempt to pull together enough of your personal information to steal your identity. This is a new and serious crime and can lead to all sorts of serious problems to those that have been affected by it.

The important thing to remember is not to jump through hoops for people if you have won the lottery. If you really have won a lottery and the people who operate the lottery have your email address and your name, they will find you. And probably turn up to your house in a limousine with champagne, not ask you to pay anything!

The UK’s lottery/">National Lottery operator, Camelot, has built up a highly regarded reputation as being one of the world’s leading operating systems. Unfortunately not all lottery systems are as honest and high-esteemed as the lottery/">National Lottery. Take a look at three of the worst winning lottery ‘systems’ in existence and what makes them so ‘terrible’.

Gail Howard / Smart Luck / Lottery Wheeling

The simple fact is that wheeling does not increase your chances of winning. This is something that is consistently dismissed from instructions when these wheeling packages are sold to you. The ‘proof’ of how well wheeling works is presented as a group of ‘winners’ giving testimonies about their new found fortunes.

In reality, many people who become involved in playing wheeling systems often end up buying a fairly significant amount of tickets for the sole reason to increase their chances of winning.

Mark Bower / Winning the Lottery in 3 Steps

Mark Bower’s “Winning the Lottery in 3 Steps” was a sellout book, which is offered as a playing guide with charts, systems and information about how to win the lottery.

Critiques and sceptics of Bower’s book insist that the winner’s photographs seem a little off? That his name on the giant cheque he’s holding seems to be a little bit photo shopped!

Take a look at the Facebook style comments at the bottom of Bower’s sales pitch. Genuine? Um… no. I managed to laugh myself silly when I read the bit in the pitch that said his results are the product of extensive studies written by a ‘Belgian science man!’

Lottery Crusher

There is an incredibly cheesy video accompanying this one. The Lottery Crusher claims to have helped millions of people win, but how many millions of people can win the lottery!? How much money is there in the world? Is the sky going to turn to gold? The Lottery Crusher is just the same old past results analysis used once again.

Before checking tonight’s lottery-numbers/">lottery numbers, you might want to remind yourself of the unfortunate case of Angela Kelly, the Royal Mail worker who won a jackpot of £35 million on the lottery/">National Lottery in 2007 and saw her life slip onto ‘nothingness’ thereafter.

Since her win, Angela Kelly has gained nearly a stone and, along with her boyfriend, has become a virtual recluse. According to reports, Ms Kelly now drives a wreck of a car, eats fast food, lives in a backstreet flat plagued by joy riders, all because she didn’t bear in mind the old saying, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’

Ms Kelly had been at work when her numbers had been drawn and says that she had been so nervous when calling up the Lottery Helpline that her hands shook and she had to place her head between her knees to calm down. When Ms Kelly’s son called, it is said that, in understating her win, Ms Kelly had told her son that she had had “a wee lottery win”.

A limousine then picked Ms Kelly up and whisked her to a £250 a night hotel where the ‘fairy godmother’ of the lottery/">national lottery, Dot Renshaw, prepared her for what would happen. Dot took Angela shopping but Angela was so alien to the expensive clothes stores that she picked herself out a simple polka dot dress.

Apparently Ms Kelly’s son did not want to move house and this was where the trouble started. Remaining in the rundown neighbourhood of East Kilbride where the family had always lived, Ms Kelly’s husband began to worry for their son’s security. Ms Kelly also became unable to cope with the constant letters from people begging for money, and the seemingly relentless attention from locals.

Friends say that the lottery/">National Lottery winner lost her sense of purpose. More recently Ms Kelly also split for her boyfriend who he went to travel the world for a sabbatical and did not wish to reunite with her on his return.

For the meantime it is believed that Ms Kelly plans to remain in the same home she has lived in since the win but friends and family are concerned for her welfare. A close colleague from the Royal Mail said that if she had won £50,000 everything would have been perfect.