A Virginia woman deprived of her favorite scratch-off lottery game ticket got over her irritation pretty quickly when the one the store clerk erroneously handed her revealed a $2 million prize.
The clerk at the gas station convenience store at Race Way Carrollton gave Kelly Lindsay a Money Blitz ticket instead of her usual game, which she did not name.
Nonetheless the peeved purchaser took the ticket out to her car, scratched off the numbers and discovered she’d been blitzed with the game’s top prize.
“I got over not being happy about it!” she told Virginia Lottery officials when she came to collect.
Faced with a choice of $2 million divided into annual payments over 30 years, or a lump-sum, pre-tax $1.25 million option, she took the latter, the Virginia Lottery said in recounting her tale.
The odds are astronomical with or without a happy accident, the lottery office noted, with chances for a top-prize Money Blitz win being one in 1,142,400. There is one more such prize out there, the lottery office said.
Ticket mistakes or near misses do occasionally snare a big winner. In California in 2022, a woman jostled by a “rude customer” into pressing the wrong button on a ticket vending machine bought a ticket she didn’t want — until it won her $10 million.
And in 2014, a Buffalo, N.Y., man was mistakenly handed an eighth ticket when he had only ordered seven. He at first gave it back to the clerk, won enough on the first seven to spring for the $20 ticket he had passed up, and went back into the store to plunk down for it after all. It too revealed a $10 million jackpot, making it “the one that almost got away,” he joked at the time.