Rebecca Wykes, from Quedgeley, won the top prize on the Cool Fortune Doubler Scratchcard from National Lottery GameStore. Her and her husband John now can’t wait for a magical Christmas full of treats – as well as a debt-free future with new husband John and their six-year-old daughter.

Wasting no time in enjoying her win, the lucky factory worker has also splashed out on a £14,000 Skoda Octavia car, to replace her current £300 Astra. House hunting is also top of the shopping list in the New Year as she plans on placing a deposit on a bigger house with a garden for her daughter to run around in.

The 26-year-old says, “It feels so good to be able to pay off debts and start the New Year by pressing the re-set button.

“We decided we couldn’t take the car out last Sunday because it was snowing, so took a walk to Asda in Quedgeley for a look around instead. We ended up buying a scratchcard and then had snowball fights before heading home, where I scratched the card. I was silent when I realised I had won and John thought there was something wrong, then he didn’t believe me.

“We phoned my mum Maureen next and she was ecstatic – she doesn’t have to worry about anything anymore as we will be sure to look after her. Everything happens for a reason and if I hadn’t started my new job at Sartorius factory two weeks ago, my shifts would have meant I would have been working in my old job and wouldn’t have been off or walking in the snow.”

Rebecca has no big plans to upgrade the family’s Christmas too much – their daughter will still have her Barbie and My Little Ponies and the family will go ahead with going to Rebecca’s mum’s for the day.

She and John, 27, her partner of eight years, got married in March in a registry office, where Rebecca wore a £60 dress, although she says they definitely would have had a fancier affair, if she had realised this windfall – the top prize on the £2 scratchcard – was around the corner.

She said, “Our daughter doesn’t really understand how much we’ve won, we tried to explain to her with a pound coins, so she now thinks we’re getting bags of them! This week has been a whirlwind but it is a wonderful feeling to win like this – the best Christmas present ever.”

Rebecca’s winning Cool Fortune Doubler Scratchcard, from National Lottery GameStore, was bought at Asda in Quedgeley. There is a 1 in 4.40 overall chance of winning a prize on each scratchcard in this game. The card costs £2 and prizes range from £2 up to the top prize of £100,000. GameStore is the home of scratchcards and online Instant Win Games from The National Lottery, offering players many different and exciting ways to play and win life-changing prizes.

The National Lottery changes the lives of winners like Rebecca as well as communities across the UK – players raise, on average, over £30m for National Lottery-funded projects every week. In Rebecca’s native Gloucester postcode area alone there have been nearly 747 individual National Lottery grants made to date, totalling £70,723,385 and funding projects across the arts, sports, heritage, health, education, environment, charity and voluntary sectors.

 

For more information on National Lottery funding please visit www.lotterygoodcauses.org.uk.