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.

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.

"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.