A woman who accidentally threw away her winning lottery ticket worth €1m (£850,000) had incredible luck after it was found two days later in a pile of rubbish.
The lottery player, who asked not to be identified, checked her ticket at a small shop in Bitonto, Puglia, Italy, only for the terminal to flash up a message reading “non-payable”. The woman consequently threw it away, assuming the message meant it was worthless.
But the woman couldn’t have been more wrong as the alert was triggered because the win was too big to be paid out in-store. She later found out through her relatives that her usual numbers; 2,4,8,10 and 51, had come up.
Recovery operation
As she tried to recover her ticket, staff at the small shop informed her it had already been tossed out with the day’s rubbish.
“And so the recovery operation began,” said Roberto Nicola Toscano, the director of the SANB rubbish collection company who agreed to help the woman.
Toscano described the saga as “nothing short of miraculous”, the Telegraph reported. “Luckily it was a Sunday, otherwise the load would have already ended up in landfill,” he told the TV network TGCOM24.
Found in a mountain of rubbish
The firm tracked the winning ticket’s journey from the moment it was picked up at the shop to its arrival at a processing facility. Mr Toscano said staff then spent two days going through waste before an employee finally found it in “a mountain of rubbish”.
He added: “It was in a bag along with other damaged tickets: this was one of the few intact ones.” The ticket-holder will have to foot the bill for the extensive search after signing a declaration agreeing to cover the costs of rummaging through the rubbish.
Mr Toscano later posted on social media: “They say that you can tell a lot about people from the rubbish they throw away.
“This was a truly unique story about an incredibly lucky person who hit the bull’s eye but was then very unlucky because the ticket ended up in the rubbish, thrown away by accident, and who in the end was incredibly lucky all over again.”
