Pa. Man Trashes $1.25M Lottery Tickets

Oh gosh, this guy must feel really, really awful. Back in December one of the regular customers of a convenience store in York bought his normal 20 or 25 Quinto tickets, and then threw them away after he misread the winning numbers. The Pennsylvania Lottery put out a news release back in February, warning whoever held the tickets with the wining numbers of 4-3-4-1-8 that they had until March 13 to cash them in, figuring that the person may have tucked them away in a kitchen junk drawer or had them in a wallet or pocketbook and hadn't bothered to check them. Since the guy always played the same numbers, 4-3-4-1-8, it's pretty obvious that he had the winning tickets. Except that he threw them away. The 25 tickets were worth $50,000 each - $1.25 million total. "He was mad," a convenience store employee said of the day he found out that he threw away more than a million dollars. Lottery officials had been mystified about what happened to the tickets. When told what had happened, lottery spokeswoman Lauren Bottaro said, "Oh no! Wow." Bottaro said the lottery hates for tickets to go unclaimed and said this instance emphasizes the importance of players checking their tickets. The $1.25 million jackpot will now remain in the state Lottery Fund. Bottaro said unclaimed tickets are very rare, composing maybe 1 percent of the number of tickets sold in the state. "We do what we can" to notify winners, Bottaro said. "But sometimes, it's just not enough."