A Spanish news reporter celebrated her winning lottery ticket on live TV and told her colleagues she was “not coming to work tomorrow” before it was revealed she had only won a fraction of the €4m (£3.4m) top prize.
Natalia Escudero, a journalist for Spain’s public broadcaster RTVE, started screaming as she reported on the winning numbers for the country’s Christmas lottery.
“I’m not going tomorrow! Natalia doesn’t work tomorrow,” she told her colleagues as she celebrated.
However, instead of winning the lottery’s top prize, known as El Gordo (the Fat One), Ms Escudero had actually won just €5,000.
She later apologised to viewers who “felt cheated” by her reaction after some people criticised her for giving the impression that she had won the jackpot.
“The last few months have been difficult for me for personal reasons, and for the first time the goddess fortune had smiled at me with a pinch,” Ms Escudero wrote on Twitter.
She said she had not meant to mislead viewers and maintained she would not be going into work after her win as she plans to celebrate her good fortune and go on holiday.
“It is sad that Natalia Escudero is today [known as] the manipulative and lying journalist from RTVE,” she added.
Ms Escudero was also filmed being drenched in cava and dancing in a conga with members of the public after announcing the winning numbers.
The top prize in the Spanish Christmas lottery can be shared, as each €200 ticket is a perforated tear-apart sheet that can be split into 10 identical sub-tickets that cost €20 each.
A number of smaller prizes can also be won, ranging from a €200 refund on the ticket to a €1,250,000 second prize.
If every ticket for the 2019 lottery was sold, the prize pot would have been €2.4bn in total.
As players can buy multiple tickets with the same numbers in the lottery, it is difficult to determine how many people may have won.
The Christmas lottery has been held in Spain for more than 200 years and was first broadcast on TV in 1957.
