A Californian woman was stood at a lottery machine in a shop, waiting to enter her usual numbers for the weekly draw as normal.
But a rather rude man pushed past LaQuedra Edwards in the busy store, causing her to fall onto the machine’s display.
In the kerfuffle, she had accidentally pressed the screen and brought a ticket for a ‘200k Scratchers’ game instead.
The 41-year-old was fuming, as you would expect, but rather than complain she just pocketed the ticket and moved on.
And the quirk of fate turned out to be rather fortunate, as Edwards scooped the jackpot with her ‘wrong’ ticket and trousered a handsome $10 million (£7 million) prize!
Amazingly, she only realised she had landed the seven-figure payday when she was driving home from the shop.
“I got on the 405 freeway and kept looking down and it and almost crashed my car,” the Californian said.
“I pulled over, looked at it again and again, scanned it with my [CA Lottery] app, and I just kept thinking this can’t be right.”
Although she didn’t have a kind word to say her for her unlikely comrade – ‘he just bumped into me, didn’t say a thing and just walked out the door’ – Edwards was naturally ecstatic with his unwanted intervention.
“I’m still in shock. All I remember saying once I found out how much I just won was ‘I’m rich!”
Lottery Lunacy
A matter of days after a lottery ‘winner’ confirmed her intention to take Camelot to court, another potential millionaire has claimed that his wallet-boosting prize has been stolen from him.
Peter Rhodes believes he has won the National Lottery jackpot, but that when he went to cash in his ticket in London a series of strange goings-on unfolded.
As the shop worker ran his ticket through the machine, it made a sound to indicate it was a winner – and then he refused to give Rhodes the slip back.
The 60-year-old then claims the employee took a different ticket from a stash under the till – and attempted to pay Rhodes a prize of £11.40.
“He tried to say it was my ticket and it wasn’t,” he told The Mirror.
“I know it wasn’t because I folded mine twice and put it in my wallet, and this one was flat.”
His worst fears were later realised when Camelot confirmed that the prize has now been claimed – but that they wouldn’t entertain his case.
“I spoke with someone in operations [at Camelot] who went out of their way to find an electronic footprint to prove I had bought the ticket.
“And then I got a call from their fraud department saying they are shutting down the case because they won’t pay out twice”.
Rhodes has now instructed a solicitor to look into the matter further, and plans to battle Camelot ‘as far as he can’. The police have also been contacted.
“It’s a life-changing amount of money,” he said.
“They haven’t stolen from me. They stole my kid’s futures. That money was going to be for them.”