Right to winning lottery tickets: What to do?

Questioner

Ir/Madam, Yesterday a 'charity' lottery took place. A good friend of mine had bought tickets for this, but because we were sitting outside we had difficulty reading the ticket numbers. Only after about 10 minutes did we realize that the main prize (a travel check worth €2500) had fallen on her lottery number. When we found out, we immediately walked forward to make it known that the winning ticket had been bought by her. To our surprise, there was already a 'winner' there because they immediately started drawing a new winner because it had taken us too long to report. When we indicated that we had the winning ticket in our possession, the woman indicated that she had already called out the winning ticket number three times and that our right to the prize had now expired and belonged to the 'new' winner. They eventually tried to resolve it by asking the other person if he was willing to share the prize (he agreed) and they added €250.00 per winner to limit the damage somewhat. I assume that a purchased ticket has some expiration date and that a won prize cannot simply expire? Isn't she entitled to the entire amount? Thank you in advance for your response!

Lawyer

How to act if the winner does not report on site within a certain time, should be stated in the general terms and conditions or rules and announced in advance. However, I think it is nicely solved.

Questioner

Thank you very much for your super fast response! I will share your vision with her and then we will leave it at that ;-) Thank you for your time!