Every Christmas, a 68-year-old Macomb County, Michigan, man and his wife buy scratch-off lottery tickets for the whole extended family to open together at their holiday party. Last December's batch looked, to him, like a modest win: a ticket he figured was worth about $500.
It was worth a thousand times that. A relative scanned the ticket with the Michigan Lottery app and told him he had "a few more zeros than that" — the "25 Days of Winning" instant ticket, bought at M&H Petro on 15 Mile Road in Clinton Township, was a $500,000 winner.
Nearly a year in a drawer
Rather than rushing to claim it, the man held on to the ticket for most of the following year before finally bringing it in to Michigan Lottery headquarters this month. Lottery officials didn't say why he waited, only that the claim was filed just before the ticket would have expired. He told the lottery he "couldn't believe it" when the win was confirmed as real and not a scanning error.
The prize puts him well within Michigan's rules, which give winners up to a year from a game's end date to redeem an instant ticket — a deadline that makes stories like this an almost annual feature of the state lottery's news releases, as big winners turn up with tickets that sat forgotten in wallets, junk drawers or, in this case, apparently just set aside and not thought about again until close to the wire. He said the money is going straight into savings, a quieter ending than the jackpot headlines that run the other way. This one is just a family tradition that, once a year, pays out considerably better than $500.