Finance04 August, 20262 min read
Italy Lottery Winner Recovers One-Million-Euro Ticket After Garbage Collectors Find It in Trash
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A woman in Apulia discarded a €1 million lottery ticket. Garbage collectors searched the trash and recovered the ticket.
6 outlets told this the same way.
Ticket Lost, Found
A lottery ticket worth one million euros was found in the trash in Italy after the winner, panicked, asked garbage collectors to help retrieve it, the waste-management company SANB said Tuesday to AFP. Roberto Nicola Toscano, director of SANB, said the ticket was "miraculously still intact" when the garbage collectors combed through the mountains of waste in their truck. Toscano said the winner went to her neighborhood store on Sunday to check her ticket after the drawing, but the machine indicated it was "non-payable" because small merchants can only pay out low-value winnings.
After a family member told her that her usual numbers had been drawn, the winner rushed back to the store only to discover the ticket had already been thrown away and the trash collected. Toscano said the family managed to identify the right garbage truck, stop it, and ask the garbage workers to help retrieve it, with the vehicle taken to the premises of a specialized company to carry out the searches.
Search and Emotion
Toscano said that because of the risk posed by potentially dangerous waste, the vehicle was taken to the premises of a specialized company equipped to perform the searches. He said the workers rummaged through the dumpster for more than a day and found several tickets. Among them was the ticket the team was looking for, which Toscano specified was "still intact" after the search.
When Toscano told the winner that they had found the ticket, he said she "cried with emotion," and he added that he would have hugged her but they were on the phone. The SANB director also said that since SANB is a public waste-collection agency, the woman agreed to cover all additional costs incurred by the operation.
Money, Rules, and Process
Toscano explained that when the winner checked her ticket at her neighborhood store on Sunday after the drawing, the machine indicated it was "not payable" because small merchants can only pay out modest winnings. He said the winner left her ticket at the store thinking she had lost it, and later learned from a family member that her usual numbers had been drawn. After the family rushed back to the store, they discovered the ticket had already been thrown away and the rubbish had been collected, but they managed to identify the correct truck and stop it.
Toscano said the employees searched the garbage bin for more than a day and found various banknotes and tickets before recovering the one-million-euro ticket. The South China Morning Post also reported that the recovered ticket was €1 million (US$1.15 million) and described it as “miraculously still in one piece,” after binmen combed through mounds of trash on their truck.