Imagine checking your email and finding out that you've won 28,000,000,005 kroner – yes, you read that right: 28 billion kroner. Flemming Dahl Jensen, along with 299 other lotto players, does not have to imagine such a surreal scenario, as last Tuesday he received that exact email from the Danish lottery firm, Danske Spil.

"I got butterflies in my stomach and started to think of all the things I could spend the money on,” Jensen told nordjyske.dk. “Travel with the family, buy a new house, a new car – I got very excited."

Now imagine getting a second email, an hour and a half later – which is plenty of time to reinvent yourself as a billionaire, to ring your boss up and tell him what you really think of him etc – informing you that you have, in fact, only won enough to take your family on a bus trip to Hillerød, buy a new doormat and pay the neighbour's delinquent son to wash your car. Again, Jensen doesn’t have to imagine such a scenario, as he and the rest of the unlucky lotto players collectively received the same slap in the face.

Danske Spil takes full responsibility for its mistake, though it also points out that the amount described in the emails was an obvious indicator that something was not quite right.

“Of course it’s our fault and we're very sorry," Morten Hedegaard, Danske Spil’s spokesperson, told nordjyske.dk. "But as the amount was billions, one should have been able to see that it was a mistake, as one simply cannot win that much money with us.”

It is not the first time that Danske Spil has raised the expectations of its players, only to shoot them down. As recently as January 22, Danske Spil misled 40,000 people into thinking they had won significantly more than they did. So lotto players beware, remember that next time Danske Spil informs you you've won big, it could easily be another round of 'easy come, easy go'.