Search “biggest bingo win” and you’ll meet a lot of millionaires. A grandfather who turned 30p into £5.9 million. A librarian who won £4.5 million. A mum who scooped £2 million from a 40p stake. Huge numbers, lovely stories. Almost none of them are bingo wins.
This piece is about the real ones. We went looking for every verified £100,000-plus bingo win in British history, recording who won, where, how much, and on what game. What we found was smaller and stranger than the headlines suggest. For a start, the UK’s biggest-ever bingo win and the UK’s official record-holding bingo win are two different wins.
Why this list starts in 2007
Bingo has been played in British halls for the best part of a century. Even so, you won’t find a single confirmed £100,000 win before late 2007. The reason is the law.
Until the 2005 Gambling Act came into force in September 2007, rollover and progressive jackpots in bingo clubs were effectively off the table.[1] Prizes couldn’t build up to significant sums because the rules wouldn’t let them. When that changed, the National Bingo Game introduced its “Big’N” jackpot, and within months Britain had its first bingo millionaires. Every win on this list happened after that point. The story of the biggest bingo wins is really the story of the last eighteen years.
The biggest win, and the record that doesn’t match
In the first half of 2008, two women won more than a million pounds playing the same game, eight weeks apart. Their wins get routinely confused with each other, and that’s worth clearing up.
On 27 January 2008, Christine Bradfield called house at the Castle Bingo club in Merthyr Tydfil and won £1,101,686 on the National Bingo Game’s Platinum jackpot. She was the world’s first Platinum jackpot winner. She shared the money with her sister-in-law Lorraine, and she holds the Guinness World Record for the greatest win at in-house bingo to this day.[2]
She isn’t, though, the biggest UK bingo winner. Eight weeks later, on 23 March 2008, Soraya Lowell won £1,167,795 on the same game at Club 3000 in Coatbridge, around £66,000 more than Bradfield.[3] Lowell’s is the largest genuine bingo win in British history. Bradfield’s is the one in the record books. Guinness, as far as we can tell, simply never updated the entry, and seventeen years on the two wins are still filed under each other’s names across most of the internet.
The biggest bingo win in Britain isn’t the one that holds the Guinness record. It says a lot about how loosely this corner of the gambling world keeps its own history.
There’s a quieter coda to Lowell’s story. Four years after the win, in 2012, she was reported to be facing bankruptcy over debts of around £13,000, including unpaid council tax, with her home at risk of repossession. Agnes O’Neill, the neighbour and bingo partner Lowell split the prize with, died just two months after banking her share. The win made headlines around the world. The years afterwards went largely unreported, as they usually do.[4]
Every £100,000+ bingo win we could verify
This is the full list of every genuine bingo win of £100,000 or more we could confirm against a primary or operator source. It’s dominated by land-based clubs, it bunches around two periods, and it’s shorter than you might think.
| Winner | Amount | Year | Venue | Game |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Soraya Lowell | £1,167,795 | 2008 | Club 3000, Coatbridge | National Bingo Game (Platinum) |
| Christine Bradfield | £1,101,686 | 2008 | Castle Bingo, Merthyr Tydfil | National Bingo Game (Platinum) |
| Anonymous | £556,000 | 2007 | Gala Club, East Ham | National Bingo Game (Big’N Gold) |
| Margaret Ann Venables | £437,104 | 2007 | Gala Bingo, Fenton | Gala “High 5” linked jackpot |
| Anonymous | £361,325 | 2009 | Gala Bingo, Poole | Gala “High 5” linked jackpot |
| Anonymous | £250,000 | 2026 | Club 3000, Wigan | National Bingo Game (£250k jackpot) |
| Anonymous | £250,000 | 2010s | Gala Bingo, Colchester | Gala “High 5” linked jackpot |
| Gareth Bedford | £171,546 | 2019 | Buzz Bingo, Southampton | Rollover “double number” jackpot |
| Anonymous | £125,000 | 2024 | Mecca Bingo, Paisley | National Bingo Game |
| Pat Alcock | £115,000 | c.2008 | Mecca Bingo, Sale | National Bingo Game |
| Anonymous | £105,000 | 2025 | Buzz Bingo, Cricklewood | “Colossus” single-game (current Guinness record) |
| Shaban Binaku | £100,000 | 2014 | Beacon Bingo, Cricklewood | “Colossus” single-game (former Guinness record) |
| “Bruce” | £100,000 | 2026 | Castle Bingo, Newport | Castle Climber link game |
| Anonymous | £100,000 | 2025-26 | Castle Bingo, Barnes Hill | Castle Climber link game |
| Maureen Russell | £100,000 | 2024 | Club 3000, Coatbridge | “Millionaire Night” link game |
| Anonymous | £100,000 | 2025 | Mecca Bingo, Gateshead | National Bingo Game (National Bingo Week special) |
| Rosa Mendonca Fatima | £100,000 | 2023 | BoyleSports, Cookstown | Betting-shop bingo |
| “Adam” | £100,000 | 2025 | Buzz Bingo (online) | Big Money Live |
| Leona | £100,000 | 2026 | Buzz Bingo, Dundee | Big Money Live |
| Anonymous | £100,000 | 2025 | Buzz Bingo, Possil Park | Big Money Live |
| Charlotte Volante | £100,000 | 2025 | Buzz Bingo, Lordshill | Big Money Live |
A few things jump out of that table. The genuine record sits a little over £1.16 million, far short of the seven-figure “online bingo wins” in the headlines, for reasons we’ll come to. The wins also bunch together. There was a run from 2007 to 2009, when the new jackpots were fresh and uncapped, then a long quiet stretch, then another run from 2024 onward as operators rolled out new linked games like Castle Climber and Club 3000’s “Millionaire Night”, Buzz’s online “Big Money Live”, and a fresh £250,000 National Bingo Game tier. After more than a decade of very little, the £100,000 bingo win is back.
The other pattern is location. Almost every win in the table happened in a physical club rather than online. Genuine online bingo wins of this size are rare. “Adam”, a Bristol player who won £100,000 on Buzz Bingo’s Big Money Live in 2025, is the clearest verified example, and that game only launched in 2024.
One thing comes up again and again in these stories. The winners don’t believe it. Gareth Bedford thought he had won £2,500 at his Southampton club. The real figure was £171,546.[5] The Paisley winner thought she had won £1,000, and when staff told her it was £125,000 she turned down a bottle of bubbly and asked for a cup of tea instead.[6] The Gateshead player also thought she had won £1,000, and burst into tears when the caller told her the real figure.[7] A six-figure bingo win is rare enough that the people it happens to assume it can’t be happening.
The biggest bingo win that wasn’t
In August 2025, a technical error in Gala Bingo’s online “Summer Nights” promotion credited players with a share of more than £1.6 million over the course of two hours. The promotion ran on 1p tickets with a maximum prize pot of £150. Some players withdrew the money before anyone noticed. One believed he had won enough to start planning his wedding.
Then Gala took it back. The company called it a “malfunction”, pointed to the clause in its terms and conditions that lets it void winnings credited in error, and asked players who had withdrawn funds to return them. The Gambling Commission confirmed it was investigating.[8] In the strict sense it was never a bingo win at all, but it belongs on an honest page about the biggest ones. It shows the gap this whole piece is about, the one between a number on a screen and money in a bank account.
The “bingo millionaires” who were playing slots
The headline wins all trace back to here. Almost none of them survive a proper look.
The most-repeated “biggest online bingo win” belongs to John Orchard, a Lincolnshire grandfather who turned a 30p stake into £5.9 million in 2012 at Butlers Bingo. He won it on a slot machine, a Dark Knight game.[9] The “£4.5 million Gala Bingo win” was a Glasgow librarian playing the Jackpot Giant slot.[10] The “£2 million Heart Bingo jackpot” was a West Midlands mum on a game Heart’s own website calls a “Slot Game” in writing.[11] The “£1.38 million Buzz Bingo win”, which the operator described as the biggest it had ever paid out online or in clubs, was won on Genie Jackpots, a slot.[12] And the famous “£1.2 million Mecca Bingo win” of 2009 was, by Mecca’s own press release at the time, a player on “her favourite slots game”.[13]
None of these are bingo wins. They happened on bingo-branded websites, which is a different thing. The online gambling press has spent fifteen years treating “won on a bingo site” and “won at bingo” as if they mean the same thing. They don’t. A genuine online bingo jackpot in the UK pays thousands, sometimes tens of thousands. The seven-figure money comes from slot networks that happen to sit on the same website. We’ve kept those wins in their own list below, because they’re real and remarkable. They’re just not bingo wins.
| “Winner” | Amount | Year | Site | What it actually was |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| John Orchard | £5,900,000 | 2012 | Butlers Bingo | Dark Knight slot |
| Anonymous | £4,500,000 | 2016 | Gala Bingo | Jackpot Giant slot |
| Anonymous | £2,000,000 | 2022 | Heart Bingo | “Make Me a Millionaire” slot |
| “Pottsy25” | £1,380,000 | 2023 | Buzz Bingo | Genie Jackpots slot |
| Lisa Potter | £1,364,745 | 2012 | Ladbrokes | Progressive jackpot, no bingo game ever named |
| Anonymous | £1,200,000 | 2009 | Mecca Bingo | Clover Rollover slot |
| Anonymous | £568,467 | 2021 | Mecca Bingo | Cleopatra MegaJackpots slot |
What this list doesn’t show
We should be honest about the gaps. A few we know about:
- There may be a “third 2008 millionaire”. Records from the period suggest three jackpots of around a million pounds were created in the six months after January 2008. We can confirm two of them. If the third exists, it has slipped out of the public record, or the winner clearly didn’t want to be identified.
- Gala’s “High 5” linked game produced several six-figure wins between 2007 and 2012. We’ve listed the ones we could verify, but there are almost certainly more, and the figures from that period are harder to pin down than the modern ones.
- A couple of dates and surnames are still loose. Pat Alcock’s win is almost certainly from the 2007-08 launch era, but we haven’t pinned the exact date, and “Bruce” in Newport has so far only ever been “Bruce”.
- Most operators publish the prize but not the winner. Where the table says “Anonymous”, the win is confirmed. The name simply wasn’t made public, and we’re not in the business of guessing. Put simply, many people value their anonymity.
The £100,000-plus win is the rare tier. The everyday engine of British bingo is the £50,000 National Bingo Game jackpot, won somewhere in the country most weeks of the year, and below that the ordinary club prizes that bring people back on a Tuesday night.
We’ll keep this page updated as wins are confirmed and as new ones happen. If you know of a verified £100,000-plus bingo win that isn’t here, we’d genuinely like to hear about it.