Joe Johnson didn’t reveal he was a millionaire to future wife Lisa

  Photo: Daily Mail

If you thought a gold-digging partner was after your lottery money, what would you do?

Having been spurned before by women taking advantage of his new wealth, a UK man went to great lengths to hide it when he began dating a new woman.

It was only once they were engaged that Joe told Lisa he had a secret

  Photo: Daily Mail

When first they met, Joe Johnson wore ratty clothes, drove a heap of a car and gave his new flame, Lisa, a cheap, unremarkable ring for Christmas in a bid to test her love for him.

He even made Lisa pay the bills, and took her on a holiday from hell to a cockroach-infested apartment.

Only when the two were engaged months later and Joe was satisfied that Lisa’s intentions were pure, that he told her.

The book that Joe Johnson wrote revealed the complete story about his wealth path

  Photo: Amazon

“I could see he didn’t have a lot of money,” Lisa told the Daily Mail, “so for him to spend what little he had on such a thoughtful gift was lovely. It meant the world to me – it still does.”

The love-struck Joe divulged his secret to his new fiancée that he was hiding a $12 million (£10 million) lottery fortune he had won in 1998.

He had turned the win into a booming investment portfolio and a string of luxury properties.

“It was the only way I could ever tell that I was truly loved for who I was, not because of the money,” Joe said later about his elaborate trick.

Guess what Joe did next? He wrote a book about his experiences.