A West Auckland man has discovered the Lotto ticket he had been using as a bookmark for almost two months is worth $20.1 million.<\/p>\n
The man, who has chosen to remain anonymous, said the winning ticket had been sitting inside a book since July. He only found it when he picked the book back up, following a break from reading.<\/p>\n
“I put the ticket straight into my wallet ready to check the next time I went to the shop,” he said.<\/p>\n
He knew Blockhouse Bay Postshop & Stationers had sold a winning ticket, but “didn’t put two and two together”. The ticket could easily have stayed on the bookshelf for months, he said.<\/p>\n
After scanning the ticket at a self-check kiosk, he initially believed the “major prize” alert meant he had won “likely a few thousand dollars”.<\/p>\n
“It still didn’t cross my mind that it would be $20m.”<\/p>\n
The Lotto operator “was more excited than me” about the win, he said.<\/p>\n
“I think I was in shock.”<\/p>\n
He said he would share the news of his lottery win with close family in the near future, as he decides what to do next.<\/p>\n
“I’m going to take things slow and really think about what to do with this money.<\/p>\n
“I do want to go on an overseas trip, but that’s the only plan so far.”<\/p>\n
In August, Lotto asked players to check their tickets after the prize went unclaimed for several weeks.<\/p>\n
“We’re so pleased the lucky winner found his ticket and checked it before we started the next stage of our search,” Lotto NZ head of corporate communications Will Hine said.<\/p>\n
“I can only imagine what it must have felt like to realise that his bookmark was worth $20.1m.”<\/p>\n
There’s still one more unclaimed prize in Auckland – a $333,333 winning ticket was sold at Four Square St Heliers for the 27 June draw.<\/p>\n
“We’d love to get this prize to the rightful owner, so if you might have bought a ticket in St Heliers in Auckland a few months ago, please have a look for it – and maybe have a scan of your bookshelf,” Hine said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A West Auckland man has discovered the Lotto ticket he had been using as a bookmark for almost…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":610914,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[138,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-610913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610913\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/610914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}