Last draw of the Euromillions lottery this year brought 7.5 million euros ($12.75 million) to unnamed 50-year-old “Mister Luck” who has become the envy of millions of Europeans.
But the lucky winner who lives in Riemst, a small Flemish town near the Dutch border, decided to give half of his multi-million-euro prize for heating to the people in need.
From MSNBC:
WELLINGTON, New Zealand - A “nagging” wife who pushed her husband to buy a lottery ticket helped scoop the $4.2 million ($7.7 million New Zealand dollar) first prize — with only minutes to spare. The man from New Zealand’s biggest city, Auckland, bought his ticket just two minutes before ticket sales closed Saturday night.
“My wife had been nagging me all week to get a ticket, so I when saw the Lotto sign … I sprinted in to get the ticket before they closed,” said the man, who asked not to be identified — normal practice among lottery winners in New Zealand.
“I must have been their last customer of the night,” he said, adding that the young married couple had had a “rough” couple of years, reduced to one income after having children.
A man from Cornwall won an extra share of the £2.5m Lotto jackpot - after he bought two tickets with the same numbers.
Derek Ladner, 59, from Redruth, Cornwall, bought a ticket after forgetting he already had one, meaning he had two wins for the same draw.
He and his wife Dawn, 60, reaped the rewards on Wednesday after being presented with a cheque for £958,284.
It is the first time the same person has won twice in the same draw.
The lucky numbers on both tickets for the draw on 11 July were 3, 9, 10, 12, 46 and 47.
A Camelot spokesman said: “It must have been a huge and happy surprise.”Two days after the draw was made, on Friday 13 July, delivery driver Mr Ladner claimed his £479,142 share of the £2.5m jackpot.
It was not until a week later he remembered he had bought another ticket with the same numbers for the same draw.
Mrs Ladner said it took her husband a little while to convince her they had hit a double jackpot.“I just couldn’t believe it - I kept telling him he’d got it wrong and to check it again,” she said.
The couple plan to have a holiday to give themselves time to contemplate what they will do with the money.
Mr Ladner is planning to give up work so he can spend more time on his favourite hobby of playing bowls.
He said they will continue to play the lottery - keeping the same numbers.
“They say lightning never strikes twice but it did, so perhaps it’ll strike three times,” he added.
AROLINE DAY and Mei-Yin Lee thought Australia really was the lucky country when they went into a Sydney newsagency to have their Lotto ticket checked and discovered they had won a division one provisional prize of $574,000.
The British backpackers had bought a ticket for the 2004 New Year’s Eve Lotto draw and had waited four days before checking if they had won anything.
Feeding their ticket into the computer at the World Square Newsagency Bookshop was Chris Ong, described as a trusted employee who had worked at the newsagency for two years.
“He was a religious person; he went to church twice a week,” the newsagent, Michael Pavellis, told a Sydney court yesterday. “I know it sounds strange after what has happened, but he was an active member of the church band. He was a well-liked person.”
As it turned out, the backpackers’ luck was hijacked by Ong, whose real name is Chrishartato Ongkoputra……
In the end the winners got their money, but not after a long legal battle as to who was responsible for allowing Ong (who disappeared overseas and has yet to be traced) to fraudulently claim the winning lottery ticket for himself.
I must have done something to please the gods recently. Remember last week when I posted about how I’d gotten a great new job and was moving to California? Peanuts compared to what just happened. You’re not going to believe this. I hardly believe it myself. If you’re standing, sit down, and if you’re sitting, stand up:
I just won the lottery.
Saturday morning, two days after arriving in California, I was in a 7-11 buying a Coke and some snacks to take back to the hotel and I saw a SuperLotto Plus sign advertising the $13 million jackpot. I thought to myself, “Boy, my luck sure has been great lately; how cool would it be if I actually won the lottery?”
So what the hell, I bought a ticket. I pulled some numbers out of my ass. It was 3:07 in the afternoon, so I started with 3-7. My birthday’s December 18th, so I added 18. The nutrition info on the Coke listed 33g of carbohydrates and 40mg of sodium: 33-40. Then, for the MegaBall number, I chose 2, since it was my second day in California and this was the second lottery ticket I’d bought in my entire life.
I just about shat my pants when they announced the winning numbers: 03-07-18-33-40…and the MegaBall? Yep: 02.
I didn’t start screaming or anything, because I had always told myself that if I ever won a million dollars I would be cool and collected. So I just sat there calmly and quietly and tried to count to a million in my head. I got to 102 before I realized how much money $13 million is.
$13 million! I’m a millionaire! A goddamn multi-millionaire! I mean, yeah, there’ll be taxes and whatnot, but still. Jesus. This just about makes up for the cost of living increase.
Of course, now all I can think about is how much work this is going to involve. I have to get the ticket verified, I have to get a financial adviser, I need to decide whether I want the lump sum or the payments, I have to fend off the hundreds of people who are going to start begging for handouts, and of course I’ve gotta do some research to make sure those numbers aren’t cursed so I don’t end up like Hurley on Lost. All while starting a new job (yes, I’m still going to go to work).
This has been one hell of a lucky month.
From Wonko.com
I don’t know what it is about visiting my parents, but it makes me want to buy lottery tickets. OK, I do know what it is. Every Christmas they give us all scratch tickets. Last year we won about 50 bucks. That wasn’t bad. And my dad used to buy tickets every week when I was a kid. I would sometimes go with him and watch him hand over his pre-filled Megabucks ticket, hoping the one dollar investment would pay off. Although he did have one $200 win once, like most people his dreams of getting lucky and hitting the jackpot are still just dreams.
I have never had a dream of winning big money in the lottery. I have been a little more pragmatic. But now I do not need to have that dream. On a whim I bought a ticket this weekend. I didn’t just buy a scratch ticket, as I usually might when I have these desires to try my luck, but a pick-your-six numbers and hope for the best ticket. When I compared my numbers to the winning numbers, I said, Hm, looks like I won. It did appear that I had matched all six numbers. I thought it must be a mistake. I saw the numbers in the newspaper (it took this novice a while to find them) so I checked on the lottery commision’s website to double-check. Even though it verified what I had read in the newspaper, I asked my wife to check it out as well. Sure enough, we had a match. Six matches in fact.
This was not the biggest jackpot in history. The official total was about $1.2 million dollars. Of course, anyone who has ever read anything about lottery winners knows that taxes will take a chunk from the official total. After lots of guessing and then some conversations with state officials (that took some doing on a Sunday and I was surprised we managed to speak with anyone today at all), the total comes out to roughly $711,000. Not too shabby, if you ask me.
I have to admit it does not seem real. It seems like some kind of joke, or hoax, or dream even. What to do with a windfall that big? I will need to take some time to figure that out. Pay off debt? Donate to nonprofits? Have a party? Buy a Prius?
I know this: I have been lucky enough in this life and this is a big one. This is luck luck luck, no skill or talent involved. I won the lottery! Who the hell can say that without making it up?
From Beagle’s Blog
A 68-year-old grandmother from Peguis First Nation has found lightning really does strike twice, winning a $1-million lottery jackpot for a second time in little more than two years.
Phyllis Thomas yesterday accepted a cheque for the jackpot for the Set For Life Scratch ‘N’ Win lottery, the same game for which she took the big prize on March 18, 2005.
“It’s made my life wonderful, but I don’t think it has changed my life. I’m still the same person,” Thomas said of her double stroke of luck, after several family members joined her at a downtown hotel for the cheque presentation.
If she has a secret to lotto success, she’s keeping it to herself — except for one tip to others who purchase tickets.
“I would say, ‘Buy, buy.’ You never know. If it has happened twice to me, it could happen to anyone,” Thomas said.
A newlywed couple from Rugeley scooped a lottery win within hours of their marriage, thanks to some quick thinking by the groom.
Lee Beddow forgot to buy his weekly ticket so he stopped off on the way to the church, before tying the knot with his sweetheart Jackie.
The loving couple scooped more than £2,000 in the National Lottery and have vowed to make their honeymoon extra special.
They jetted off to Jamaica today and have upgraded their flights to first class. They also have tickets to see England play Australia in the Cricket World Cup. Lee, aged 41 and a music lecturer at Stoke College, married Jackie, a 33-year-old nurse, at The Oakley Hotel in Brewood last Friday.
Minutes earlier he had bought a ticket from the Texaco garage in Boscomoor Lane, Penkridge, despite never having won more than £10 before.
The pair, who have a son James, aged six, and live off Hednesford Road, matched five numbers in the draw.
Lee, who also owns Rugeley-based recording studio Abbey Sound, said it was the best weekend of his life. “The wedding was the best day of our lives and the win on the lottery was the best icing possible on the cake,� he said.
“I remembered on my way to the wedding that I’d forgotten to buy a ticket, so I stopped at a garage on the way to pick one up. I had my ticket checked in my local shop on Sunday morning and was shocked when I was told I’d matched five numbers.�
But the happy couple had to change honeymoon plans at the last minute because their hotel had not been completed. They were originally due to fly to Antigua for the cricket match but had to swap destinations to Ocho Rios.
Lee added: “We’ve got tickets for England against Australia, so the money will come in useful to find a way to still get there.�
The many hopefuls who invest a few dollars (or more) in lottery tickets in pursuit of instant wealth employ a variety of methods for choosing the potential winning entries. Some select numbers corresponding to personally signficant dates (e.g., birthdays, anniversaries); some depend upon intuition or “lucky” feelings; some believe analyzing past results will help them determine future winning numbers; some have tried the “brute force” approach of buying up as many combinations as possible; and some are content to simply play with randomly-selected entries.
Many successful lottery entrants have said their winning combinations came to them in dreams; that they awoke with five or six numbers dancing in their heads, jotted the combinations down, played them, and won. Sometimes the dreamed-of numbers paid off right away, and sometimes the dreamers played those combinations for years before hitting the jackpot. So, that 86-year-old Mary Wollens of Toronto won the Ontario Lottery on 30 September 2006 after seeing “a lotto ticket and a large cheque” in a dream a couple of days before the drawing wasn’t all that unusual — the remarkable part was that her prophetic dream enabled her to win the same lottery twice…..Read full story here
A chef in Beijing has hit a jackpot of $1.3 million.
The cook, who has requested anonymity from the lottery organisers, bought 100 Sports Lottery tickets for two yuan each from a Beijing lottery vendor with the same number “56470″ on February 15. Each ticket won $13,000.
The new addition to the millionaire ranks said, he was not a regular buyer of lottery tickets and had no secret for guessing the right numbers. He said he just wanted to try his luck during the festival, local media reported on Monday.
China’s lottery sales reached 81.93 billion yuan in 2006, after it launched the first lottery in June 1987. China has two lotteries - the China Welfare Lottery and China Sports Lottery.
From builders to reps of mutual fund managers to bankers — everyone is trying to fix an appointment with Girish Rathod. No, Rathod is not an NRI investor with disposable funds. He is a sweeper with Mumbai’s KEM Hospital. And he hit the Playwin’s Super Lotto jackpot of Rs375m last Thursday.
Ever since his name was announced as the winner, Rathod has been besieged by a regular flow of visitors at his one-room tenement at a chawl in Dadar in central Mumbai.
All are vying with one another to give 42-year-old Rathod free advice on how to invest the money with them for maximum gain.
But Rathod remains unfazed through this sudden turn in fortune and has his priorities chalked out.
“I am clear about what I want. For the last 13 years we have been living in a 180-sq ft rented room. I will first buy a flat for my family. I will also continue working as a sweeper at KEM. But before anything else, I will repay the Rs90,000 I borrowed from my colleagues over the years,â€? said a beaming Rathod……
Read the whole story here