Writer
It's every lottery player's worst nightmare. You pick the winning numbers or scratch off the cover and reveal the instant win symbols.
Suddenly, you're shopping on Zillow for a new house, booking tickets for your dream vacation, and popping a bottle of champagne when you realize that there's just one issue standing between you and your fortune: you lost the ticket.
Did you drop it? Throw it in the trash? Run it through the laundry?
Whether they're worth one dollar or one million, most lottery tickets are just flimsy pieces of paper that are easily crumpled, rumpled, and lost. And more than a few players have won big, only to lose just as big when they couldn't find their million-dollar ticket.
These are the stories of players who lost and sometimes found million-dollar lottery tickets.
Mike Weirsky - $273 million
If you misplaced a $20 bill, you'd be pretty upset. So, how would you feel if you couldn't find a lottery ticket worth $273 million?
New Jersey man Mike Weirsky was unemployed, recently divorced, and struggling to pay his bills when he bought a lottery game that could completely change his life. He just had to find where he put the ticket.
Weirsky was a frequent lottery player, spending up to $20 a week buying quick-pick Mega Millions tickets at his local QuickCheck convenience store.
In February 2019, he made his routine weekly purchase when he made one critical mistake: He left his ticket on the counter of the store where he bought it.
While it may seem difficult to understand how someone could forget a ticket that was potentially worth a quarter of a billion dollars, Weirsky explained that he fell victim to a simple distraction that we can all relate to. He said at a news conference:
I was paying more attention to my cellphone. I put the tickets down to put my money away, then I did something with my phone and just walked away.
It was only after he got home that he realized he had lost his ticket. He spent hours searching his house but came up empty. Then he decided to return to the store where he had purchased the ticket and asked the clerk if, by some miracle, someone had returned his lost ticket.
Sometimes, miracles do happen. The clerk mentioned that another clerk, named Phil Campolo, had returned a lost ticket. They quizzed Weirsky about which tickets he had bought and then returned them to him.
“I was very thankful there was an honest person out there because I thought it was gone,” he stated.
A few days later, he heard that the winning ticket had been purchased from the same QuickCheck store. He checked the lottery app on his phone and realized that his returned ticket had the winning numbers.
“I said to my mother, 'Hey, that just said I was the jackpot winner,'” he said. “And she's like, 'What's that mean?' “I said, 'I won $273 million and she was like, 'Get the hell out of here.'”
Weirsky couldn't quite believe it himself, so he sat down to watch TV. However, he couldn't contain his excitement, and even though it was the middle of a snowstorm, he left his house and went to a local store, where he scanned his ticket and verified that he had indeed won the jackpot.
He opted for the lump sum payout and collected $162.5 million.
While he was lucky that a good Samaritan had returned his ticket, James Carrey, the acting executive director of the New Jersey Lottery, said he was very fortunate that the person didn't decide to keep it because they could have easily claimed the prize.
Mr. Carey said at the news conference:
If you have a winning ticket, we always urge our players: Sign that ticket right away. If you think about it, it is very difficult to say who owns a lottery ticket short of someone coming in here and saying, “I purchased this ticket. It's mine.”
Nick Slatten - $1.2 million
Nick Slatten had just finished a long day laying tile in Sparta, Tennessee when he and his boss decided to make a quick stop at a local grocery store. Slatten bought a drink, two scratch-off tickets, and a ticket for the Tennessee Cash Lottery.
He didn't watch the drawing, but he checked his lottery phone app the next day and saw that he had picked the winning numbers.
He told the Washington Post:
I pulled the lottery app up on my phone. I recognized two of the numbers on my ticket. I pulled out my ticket and I noticed every single number was matching up as I was driving down the road.
Slatten had played the lottery for years, but until March 11, 2021, he had never won more than a few hundred dollars. However, his winning Tennessee Cash Lottery ticket was worth almost $1.2 million.
Slatten texted his wife, Michelle Doll, the big news and then rushed to the restaurant where she worked as a server. Instead of greeting him with joy, she was confused to see him because she never checked her phone to read his texts.
They agreed to keep the ticket in a secure place until they could cash it in, but Slatten was too excited and had to show it to one more person. After being away for several years, his brother was visiting, and he wanted to show him the good news.
However, while they ran errands together, Slatten realized that he had misplaced the ticket. He searched his car, but it was nowhere to be found. The brothers then retraced their steps, stopping at a Taco Bell, where they had lunch, and finally at an O'Reilly's Auto Parts, where they had made a stop.
He miraculously found his missing ticket in the parking lot of the car parts store.
“It's a million-dollar ticket, and someone stepped right over it,” Slatten told the Tennessee Education Lottery Corp.
While the thirty-one-year-old admits that the money might not be enough to retire at his young age, he thinks it will at least let him relax a little more.
“I told [my boss] that I wouldn't quit, but I wouldn't care if he slowed down on the work,” he told the post.
Anonymous - $1 million
An Illinois woman went grocery shopping to pick up bread, milk, and one million dollars.
The anonymous winner's journey to riches started when she decided to buy a Lucky Day Lotto ticket on a whim while shopping at a Jewel-Osco grocery store in Elmhurst, Illinois.
She told Illinois Lottery officials, “While on my way to visit my Aunt, I made a quick stop at Jewel to pick up a few groceries, and before heading out the door, I grabbed a quick pick Lucky Day Lotto ticket.” She then put the ticket in her purse and "forgot all about it."
It wasn't until a few days later, when she searched her purse, that she came across the forgotten lottery ticket. She scanned it with her lottery app and discovered she had won one million dollars.
"I scanned the ticket one more time to double-check, and when it showed '$1,000,000' again, I instantly started crying. I thought, 'This is unbelievable.'”
The woman says she plans to use part of her winnings to visit Ireland, her favorite place on earth.
She told lottery officials, “The landscape is stunning, and I'm thrilled that I can now look forward to these trips every year."
Phillip H. - $500,000
Washington, DC, resident Phillip H. thought his numbers were so nice that he bought them twice. For the August 12 Lucky for Life drawing, Phillip purchased two lottery tickets with identical numbers 3, 6, 17, 24, and 35 and the Lucky Ball 2.
While most players purchasing multiple tickets would use different numbers, Phillip says using the same numbers was always part of his plan. “I always get two tickets, and I always pick my own numbers. That's my winning strategy. I saw that the first ticket was a winner but couldn't find the other ticket,” he told lottery officials.
His winning strategy worked to perfection when he saw his numbers posted online. Each ticket was worth $500,000.
However, there was just one major hurdle to his becoming a millionaire: He lost one of the tickets. He cashed in the one he still had and then spent a month looking through his entire house for the second.
After a long and desperate search, he finally found his missing ticket. “After searching through old tickets, I found it and let out a big sigh of relief.”
Phillip plans to use part of his winnings to purchase a truck to help with his environmental volunteer work and repair his house.
Anonymous - $26 million
Unfortunately, not all of these stories have a happy ending. In 2021, a woman in Norwalk, California, claimed that she had the winning ticket for the November 14 Super Lotto drawing, with the numbers 23, 36, 12, 31, 13, and the mega number 10.
That jackpot is worth $26 million, or $19.6 million if selecting the lump sum option.
Her only problem was that she said that she accidentally left the ticket in her pants pocket and destroyed it when she ran the pants through her washing machine.
Employees at the Norwalk Arco, where she claimed to have purchased the ticket, checked their surveillance footage and they said they could confirm she was in the store the day she said she bought the ticket. This footage was turned over to California Lottery officials, who will use it to try to verify her story.
Lottery spokeswoman Cathy Johnson says that if someone loses a winning ticket, they must find a way to prove that they own it, such as photographing the front and back of the ticket to collect the prize.
Four lottery jackpots of twenty million dollars or more have gone unclaimed in California since 1997, including one worth $63 million in 2015.
If the woman's story is true but she cannot claim the prize, the entire sum will be donated to benefit California public schools.
Hold on
For such a small piece of paper, a winning lottery ticket holds a lot of value. That's why it's probably a good idea to have some sort of plan for what to do with your ticket, whether it's a winner or not.
Most lottery officials suggest that you sign the back of your ticket to show that you're a valid owner and that taking a photo of it might not be a bad idea either. Finally, think of a safe place to keep it, such as a desk drawer or even a safe. Leaving it in your wallet or cramming it into the pocket of your jeans is just asking to lose it.
Remember, you can't change your life if you can't hold on to your big winner.
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