When people get in the habit of playing the lottery, they may also end up throwing their tickets away before they have properly checked if they have won.
Some still are not familiar with when their lottery tickets are winners as well, leading them to wrongly believe that they had won nothing.
This is more or less what happened to a woman in the city of Bitonto in Italy, with one lucky winner accidentally throwing away her $1.15-million lottery ticket.
Realizing her mistake, the woman tried to retrieve the ticket, only to be devastated by the news that the garbage truck had already passed through. However, the events that ensued would have her reunited with her ticket.
Why Throw Away a Million-Dollar Lottery Ticket?
The circumstances around the discarded ticket are more of an honest mistake than careless disregard.
The woman did take her lottery ticket to her local shop to check if it had indeed been a winner, and when she scanned the ticket, she received a message: “non-payable.”
What the woman mistook to mean that the ticket had not won was, in fact, the message that tickets that are too large to cash out at a local store. The ticket was thus thrown into the trash.
As good fortune would have it, however, the numbers used by the woman were in fact the winning ones, and she was alerted to the fact by a family member.
Family Member Notices the Numbers Are Actually Winners
The numbers 2, 4, 8, 10, and 51 were indeed the ones that had been used on the ticket. The woman was confused at first, but she swiftly realized her mistake and rushed back to retrieve her ticket, only to be devastated by the fact that the garbage truck had already passed through.
However, a quick call to the waste management company, SANB, set events on the right track. The company’s workers moved swiftly and were able to determine where the ticket would be.
Then, garbagemen combed through the litter and garbage manually to try and find the ticket, which they did in the end and were able to hand it back to the woman, who was beyond herself and hardly able to believe her extraordinary good luck.