Lottery Player Finds Winning Ticket Days Before Deadline

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3. Lottery Player Finds Winning Ticket Days Before Deadline

A lottery player in the USA was just eight days away from missing out on a $1 million prize when he found an old ticket and discovered that it was a winner. Joemel Panisa, who lives in Oregon, had bought the ticket in January 2016 for Mega Millions and placed it in an envelope in his home office for safekeeping.

The ticket remained in that hiding place for almost a year, when Joemel decided to make the most of a prolonged snowstorm by clearing out his home. It was then that he found the envelope and checked the ticket online to discover that it had won a prize worth $1 million.

Fortunately for Joemel, the deadline for claiming his prize still hadn’t passed, but it was only eight days away and so he had to act immediately to avoid missing out. If he’d left his house-clearing exercise until just a couple of weeks later, this story of last-minute success would have been very, very different.

Joemel’s experience should serve as yet another reminder to lottery players everywhere about the importance of checking tickets regularly, and preferably as soon as possible after every draw has taken place. Here in the UK, players must claim any prize won within 180 days of a win occurring, so being prompt and thorough is even more important, and a casual attitude could be costly.

Right now, our Unclaimed Lottery Prizes page reveals that there are several big prizes which are due to expire in the very near future. One Thunderball prize of £500,000 actually expires today (Monday 16 January), so if you have ever purchased a ticket for that game in the Rotherham area you should be sure to check your old tickets immediately. 

A Lotto Raffle prize of £1 million is set to expire this Thursday 19 January, and a Mega Week Millionaire Maker prize of £1 million plus a luxury holiday to the Gold Coast will expire on Wednesday 25 January. There are eight other prizes of £1 million which will expire before the end of February, as well as quite a few smaller prizes that are awaiting a claim, so our advice to everyone is to check all of your previous tickets so that you don’t accidentally miss out on a big win.

To make this task as easy as possible, our Lottery Checker pages allow you to check your numbers against our database of results for the past six months. We have free lottery checkers for all of the main lottery games, so do hunt around for your old tickets and spend a few minutes checking them properly rather than simply assuming they aren’t worth a fortune.

Those of you who are satisfied that you haven’t already won a fortune can have another go at winning a life-changing sum this week. EuroMillions will offer a jackpot of around £62 million on Tuesday 17 January, and the midweek Lotto draw on Wednesday 18 January will boast an estimated top prize of £12.2 million. Enjoy both games and good luck with your numbers!