09:43
08 Feb
Winning the lottery requires more luck than most people will collect in their lifetime, but for one Michigan woman it required an extra bit of good fortune to bag her $3million win!
55-year-old Laura Spears decided to buy a ticket for the Michigan Mega Millions lottery on New Year’s Eve, 2021, after seeing an ad on Facebook.
But despite matching five white balls for $1million and tripling up that sum to a whopping $3million due to choosing the “Megaplier” option, Laura might never have realised she’d won if she hadn’t been searching for a mislaid email from a friend.
“I saw an ad on Facebook that the Mega Millions jackpot was getting pretty high, so I got on my account and bought a ticket,” Spears explained. “A few days later, I was looking for a missing email from someone, so I checked the spam folder in my email account. That’s when I saw an email from the Lottery saying I had won a prize. I couldn’t believe what I was reading, so I logged in to my Lottery account to confirm the message in the email.”
If, like most people, messages in the spam folder are avoided like the plague and emptied regularly, a life-changing windfall might well pass you by. Laura Spears would have had a full year to spot her winner’s message before her claim timed out.
£3million and a marriage down the drain
Others have not been so fortunate, one UK couple’s lost ticket for a similar sum – £3million – leading to their marriage breaking down.
The pair knew they had won only when they saw an appeal for the winning ticket holder to come forward, their weekly numbers having hit the jackpot.
The catch was, 6 months after they had bought it, they couldn’t find their ticket, and despite Richard Branson and former Prime Minister Tony Blair supporting their claim, they didn’t receive a penny.
“Having that money taken away was torture,” Martyn told a national newspaper after his marriage had broken down and 5 years of legal wranglings over the lottery win brought him nothing but pain. “For a long time I lost sight of who I was and what I believed in. But I can honestly say I’m glad I didn’t get the £3million now. There is no guarantee it would have brought me happiness.”
Youngsters kiss goodbye to £182million
Three million of any currency pales into insignificance compared to the £182million Euromillions jackpot that a young English couple missed out on due to insufficient funds in their account.
19-year-old Rachel Kennedy, and 21-year-old Liam McCrohan, 21, were “absolutely heartbroken” when they discovered that their winning ticket numbers hadn’t been processed.
“I called the number thinking that I had won £182million and they said ‘yeah you’ve got the right numbers but you didn’t have the funds in your account for the payment of the ticket so it didn’t actually go through.’”
If you have a lottery jackpot story to match these, please share it on our social media channels – bad beats or big wins, we’d love to hear them all!
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