Man who scammed £2.5m with faux Lotto ticket pays again money however £1million nonetheless lacking
Edward Putman was ordered to pay back the money he had stolen following the fake win, but a new report has found that £1million of the prize he had “won” remains missing
A Lotto scammer who used a bogus ticket to claim a £2.5million jackpot has settled a huge bill following a court order — but more than £1million is still reportedly missing. Bailiffs are now trying to seize assets in an effort to recoup the loss to Camelot.
Edward Putman was put behind bars for nine years in 2019 when he was 54 after a trial heard he had lodged a fake lottery ticket in 2009. He has since paid off a £939,000 court-imposed confiscation bill, handed down after the National Lottery con, helped in part by Camelot insider Giles Knibbs.
The huge scandal was only uncovered when Knibbs took his own life after Putman refused to hand over his share of the prize money. Now, Crown Prosecution Service barristers have now successfully managed to seize an added £240,000 from the £1.2million sale of a property he purchased with his ill-gotten gains.
But, according to the Mirror, documents have shown that despite also coughing up £85,000 in interest as part of the Proceeds of Crime Act order, some £1.25million is still missing. It comes after Putman was released from prison last year, after serving less than half of his sentence for the large-scale scam.
The offender had already completed another prison stretch, for raping a pregnant teenager in 1991. A pal of Mr Knibbs demanded to know what Putman had done with the rest of the cash.
“Putman is evil,” they said, “he took advantage of Giles and he couldn’t live with it. Now Putman is free and able to move on with his life; Giles doesn’t get that chance. What did he do with the rest of the £1.2m? It’s a scandal.”
Former bricklayer Putman first met Mr Knibbs, who worked in Camelot’s fraud detection department, whilst carrying out construction work at his home, and the pair forged an unlikely friendship. The duo were reported to have had ambitions of property development and had started collaborating working together to make it a reality.
Over time, they secretly came up with a plan to steal £2.5million from the company behind the lottery, with Mr Knibbs making a counterfeit ticket and Putman presenting it, claiming he had discovered it in his van just days before the six-month deadline to check if the ticket was a winner.
The real winning ticket, which remains unclaimed, was bought at a Co-op shop in Worcester on March 11, 2009. It had the winning numbers 6, 9, 20, 21, 31 and 34.
Lottery operators Camelot then accepted the forgery as authentic — even though it lacked a barcode as the bottom section had been ripped away. The con was only exposed following Mr Knibbs’s death by suicide in October 2015 at Ivinghoe Beacon in Buckinghamshire.
After they pulled off the scheme, the 38-year-old had admitted to mates that he and Putman had “conned” the lottery. But despite the success of the plan, relations between the pair soured over how the proceeds were split.
In June 2015, Putman had approached police claiming Mr Knibbs had threatened to expose his previous convictions for rape and benefits fraud. Meanwhile, the suicide note Mr Knibbs sent to his boyfriend Olivier Orphelin explicitly mentioned Putman, stating: “Don’t listen to him; he will lie about everything.”
Following his death, officers discovered notes plotting the scheme and launched an inquiry. The investigation was shelved when Camelot couldn’t trace the ticket but was revived in 2017 after the ticket surfaced.
Putman walked free from jail last year as part of a programme aimed at reducing overcrowding in prisons, much to the dismay of Knibbs’ loved ones. A pal of Mr Knibbs’ family said: “They’ve never got to the bottom of what he did with the money; it’s horrific.”
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