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An Auckland woman got the surprise of her life after a phone call from Lotto NZ led her to find a forgotten bonus ticket in her handbag – a piece of paper worth a sweet $500,000.
The woman, who wishes to remain anonymous, was contacted by Lotto NZ’s winners’ team last week in relation to a Lotto First Division prize from the draw on May 31 that was unclaimed.
“I got a call asking if I had bought a ticket around that time and whether I might have any old ones lying around,” she says.
“I had noticed some tickets in my bag a few days before but assumed I had already checked them and thought no more about them.”
After a bit of rummaging through her bag she found the tickets – one of them being a bonus ticket she had won in the draw before.
“The person on the phone read out the winning numbers as I checked them on my ticket – I had all six and she asked me if I knew what that meant – but I didn’t.
“That’s when she told me that matching six Lotto numbers was a First Division prize, and the prize for that draw was $500,000. I didn’t know what to say. I was absolutely speechless and almost in tears.”
After the call, the woman told her husband what had happened. The couple checked the ticket on the MyLotto app and ‘a major prize’ popped up on the screen.
“That’s when he started to believe it was true and tucked it into his wallet for safe keeping,” she says.
“I joked with him saying ‘hey, what’s wrong with keeping it in my bag – it’s been safe there for months’.”
She says the ticket had been in a zipped pocket of her handbag since she got it.
“It’s been everywhere with me for the past few months, even on an overseas holiday. I can’t believe I was basically carrying around a bag with $500,000 in it. I call this my magic bag now.”
The couple are planning to buy their first home with the money.
“This changes everything for us – it means we can buy our first home, and I just don’t have words for how that feels,” she says.
The woman did have one burning question for Lotto NZ when she claimed her prize, and that was ‘how did you know the winner was me?’.
When the ticket went unclaimed for over a month, the team at Lotto NZ started working behind the scenes to find the winner using electronic transaction records.
“When the woman claimed her bonus ticket, she also bought another ticket using a card, and that card was registered to a MyLotto account, which had a phone number listed,” Lotto NZ head of corporate communications Will Hine says.
“That gave us enough information to reach out and ask some questions – and luckily she still had the ticket.
“If she’d lost the ticket, we would have needed to go through a full investigation to confirm ownership – like we did earlier this year with another Auckland winner.
“We’re really happy to know that this prize is going to make such a difference in their lives, helping them into their first home.”
