I let my girlfriend live rent-free with me if she bought Lottery tickets – then we won and she ran off with the cash

A MAN who let his girlfriend live with him rent-free in return for her playing the lotto is distraught after she dumped him and cut him off from the £3.6 million jackpot.

Kirk Stevens insists that he is owed some of the money after letting then-squeeze Laura Hoyle live with him for free - but the winnings are in her name.

Having lost her job in senior management at a logistics firm and sold her home in Wolverhampton, Laura moved in with Kirk.

Instead of paying rent, she would buy lottery tickets in the hope of winning enough to have a new life with Kirk.

"She asked me how much rent I wanted, but as far as I was concerned she was my girlfriend," says Kirk.

"I didn’t expect her to pay rent, I didn’t ask her for a penny."

In return for free bed and board, Laura promised to play the lottery in the hopes of hitting it big, usually spending around £25 a week on tickets.

She continued to play after landing a new job with the delivery firm Hermes and soon received a message telling her she had won.

However, Laura ignored the messaged for two weeks, believing that she had only won a fiver.

The happy couple were soon snapped posing with their big cheque, which guaranteed them a pay-out of £10,000 every month over 30 years, worth more than £3.6 million.

Kirk says that they were "semi-sharing" the money, with Laura paying him £1,000 per month and still having cash to quit her job and buy a flash sports car.

According to him, they were planning to "buy properties together and build an empire", having already put a deposit on a £500,000 new home in Linby.

They even thought about setting up a "ghost-hunting" business and regularly went on the search for the supernatural with a night-vision camera.

Kirk was apparently planning to propose until the pair "hit a bad patch" and he decided to wait longer.

Laura was "reluctant too commit", says Kirk, adding that he thought "the money was part of the problem."

In June this year, Laura broke off the relationship after attending a friend's wedding with Kirk.

"She just told me she didn’t want to be with me any more. Our relationship had gone downhill but I wasn’t expecting the split."

He felt that "the money gave her confidence to throw it all away" and made her "snobbish and superior."

When the home they had secured together was finished, Laura moved in on her own, taking lots of the couple's stuff with her.

Apparently, she made it "very clear" to Kirk that the money was hers and hers alone, and that the £1,000 she'd been paying him every month was "rent" not a share of the winnings.

Camelot, who run the National Lottery, have since confirmed that even though the big cheque used for publicity photos was made out to both of them, all winnings are paid to an individual and Laura's was the winning account.