It could be sue! Crooks go to court to fight for lotto £4m

He was sentenced at the Old Bailey to a community order with 140 hours unpaid work. His legal papers for Mr Goodram and Mr Watson claim the pair from Bolton, Lancs, are homeless and have to use friends’ bank accounts to process their Universal Credit.

They claim the winning ticket was one of five they bought from a Waitrose branch in Clapham, south London, in April.

As well as the jackpot-winning card, their batch included a £10 winner, which the retailer – as a partner of Camelot – paid out on. The company refused to honour the £4million ticket because investigators claimed it was acquired using a “debit card without the consent of the account holder”. The men deny this.

They said that by allowing the £10 payout, Camelot accepted the validity of the Scratchcard and the contract entered into when it was bought.

The claimants say they sent Camelot a cheque for the £50 cost of the tickets to make good “any issues”.

Mr Hendron claims his clients have suffered “loss and damage” through Camelot’s dismissal of their claim. Camelot says Mr Goodram claimed he had bought the ticket with a card owned by a friend he knew only as “John”. It adds: “Mr Goodram has given the debit card back to ‘John’. ‘John’ has returned to Bolton where he lives.

“Mr Goodram claimed not to have any contact details for John and he claimed not to know the address where that individual lives.”

The company said the Waitrose fraud department told them the account holder had not authorised the transaction.