SCHMUCK –
Jan. 29, 2026 – Lottery winner John Eric Spiby gets more than 16 years behind bars. An 80-year-old lottery winner who once took home $3.3 million has been jailed for helping run what a judge called one of the largest fake-pill operations ever uncovered by UK police. Prosecutors said Spiby led a drug network based at his “quiet, rural” home near Wigan that churned out counterfeit tablets of diazepam (aka Valium) on an industrial scale, with a potential street value of up to $398 million, reports the Guardian. The court heard that after his 2010 lottery win, Spiby modified the property and paid for machinery worth thousands of dollars to manufacture the bogus pills. In a group chat, Spiby had reportedly joked that “Elon [Musk] and Jeff [Bezos] best watch their backs.”
