YOU may be the winner of a Premium Bond fortune – without realizing it

Tens of thousands of households could receive unexpected windfall thanks to a move by National Savings & Investments (NS&I) to track down winners of unclaimed Premium Bond prizes.

There are more than 2.3 million unclaimed Premium Bond prizes totaling £80.2 million, NS&I tells Wealth & Personal Finance.

Most unsuspecting winners don’t know their luck because they haven’t updated their contact details with NS&I. This happens, for example, if they have moved. Then if they win, NS&I can’t catch them.

But some winners may not know they are Premium Bondholders. This is because they were given paper bonds as a child – without knowing it. Since their launch in 1956, these have been a popular gift for babies.

Paper-based bonds can eventually be put away and forgotten – and the recipient may not know they exist.

NS&I has made renewed efforts to track down winners in recent months and has successfully reissued 33,888 prizes worth approximately £1 million since December 2021.

In April, it also launched a small pilot project to contact the loved ones of customers NS&I says have died with unclaimed prizes to their names. So far 1,190 prizes with a total value of £33,000 have been paid out to the beneficiaries.

Nevertheless, the number of unclaimed prizes could rise in the coming months as the odds of winning increased to a 24-year high last week.

The prize percentage for September’s draw will be 4.65 percent – up from four percent this month. This is the highest since 1999. The odds of winning will improve from 22,000 to 21,000 to one.

What is NS&I doing to identify winners? And how can you check if you could be one of them?

NS&I has a mission

Premium Bonds are the country’s favorite savings product – about 21 million people have them. They do not pay regular interest, but instead offer the chance to win tax-free prizes through monthly draws.

However, over the years, holders can lose track of their bonds, resulting in 2,300,822 unclaimed prizes. This equates to about 0.36 percent of the total prices ever paid.

Prizes are classified as unclaimed after 18 months. And it’s not just older bonds that have been forgotten: the year with the most unclaimed prizes is 2020 – with 271,110.

Determined to reduce the number of unclaimed prizes, NS&I is working with a specialist data company to track down customers who have lost contact.

NS&I will provide lists of customers it believes have moved from the address on its records. The data company then compares this information against various sources to see if it can match customer information to a possible current address.

NS&I sends a letter to these suspicious addresses asking whether they may be Premium Bondholders. This process has resulted in more than a million customers being traced to a new address to date.

People who respond to the letters are put through a security process to ensure that NS&I only reunites people with money and prizes that are rightfully theirs. In some cases, NS&I finds that the customer still resides at the address known to him.

It also checks that it does not detect deceased customers.

Hunting for offspring

NS&I has also been working on a new project to trace the families of customers believed to be deceased.

If an NS&I customer dies, his or her surviving relatives must inform the savings provider. However, many forget this and leave future prizes unclaimed.

Prizes won in the first year after an individual’s death can be claimed by the beneficiary and paid out when the account is closed. Prizes won after that will be reassigned to the next number in the next draw.

Mary’s £150 prizes were hidden in the attic

Windfall: Mary Green was given a gift of £10 in bonds shortly after she was born

Mary Green was going through boxes in her attic while moving when she came across an old Premium Bond certificate with her name on it.

Her grandparents gave Mary a gift of £10 worth of bonds shortly after she was born. But her grandparents died many years ago and Mary, 48, from Gloucester, didn’t know she had them.

Mary entered her holder’s number on the NS&I website and was delighted to discover that she had won £150. After proving her identity by providing her driver’s license and bank details, the money was in her account five days later.

‘It was a nice surprise. I hadn’t had my first child in a long time and I wasn’t working at the time, so I was thankful for the extra money,” says Mary, a financial advisor at Rosewood Financial Planning. It’s easy to check if you’ve won. It’s worth checking to see if you discover tapes you’ve forgotten about – or didn’t know you had.’

An NS&I spokesperson says: ‘To find beneficiaries we used a variety of sources of information, including correspondence returned to us as ‘unknown at this address’, cross-checking records with the Office of the Public Guardian and credit bureaus.

“We have written to the last known address and have also used a large number of specialized agencies who search files to identify potential relatives and their beneficiaries.”

Big prizes

Despite NS&I’s best efforts, five £100,000 prizes and nine £50,000 prizes remain to be claimed. One was only won in February 2020 by a bondholder in Berkshire, who held £21,113 worth of bonds at the time of the draw. There are even two unclaimed awards dating back to 1957 – the year after bonds were launched.

See if you won

If you have a Premium Bond holder number, you can use it to check if you are a winner on the NS&I website (nsandi.com) or the app. Your number can be found on letters or other communications from NS&I. Winning bond details are updated on the first business day of each month.

If you do not know your Premium Bond holder number, you can find missing positions using NS&I’s Tracing Service. This involves downloading and printing a paper form from the NS&I website and sending it to the head office in Sunderland.

If you do not have a printer, call 0500 007 007 or write to Tracing Service, NS&I, Sunderland SR43 2SB. Provide information such as your full name and current address, as well as details of past addresses, previous names if your name was changed through marriage or divorce, and the approximate year your account was opened and the raw value of your holdings (if you know). You can also make a claim on behalf of someone who has passed away.

The mylostaccount.org.uk website can also be used to track down old NS&I records, as well as other bank and mortgage accounts that may have been forgotten. This can be useful if you suspect that someone opened an account for you when you were a child and you are unaware of the details.

NS&I maintains records of all prize holders, regardless of when the prize was won or the bond was purchased. There is no time limit to submit your claim. However, unclaimed prizes are not adjusted for inflation, so the sooner you claim your prize, the more valuable it will be in real terms.

The best way to ensure you receive prizes is to have them automatically deposited directly into your bank account or reinvested in more Premium Bonds.