Garbage collectors in Italy miraculously found a $1.15 million lottery ticket among six tons of trash after the desperate winner asked them to help her recover it.
When the woman checked her numbers at a store in Bitonto, Puglia, and the machine showed a “non-payable” message, she threw away the lottery ticket, thinking it wasn’t a winner. It turned out that her award was actually too big for the store to pay out.
It wasn’t until family members pointed out that the numbers they always played — 2, 4, 8, 10, and 51 — had actually won that she realized her mistake. Unfortunately, garbage collectors had picked up the trash by the time she realized her error.
“It was then that they realized the misunderstanding. So they all went to the shop together and discovered that the tickets had been thrown away and collected by one of our operators,” Roberto Nicola Toscano, the director of waste management company SANB, told the BBC.
The waste management company retraced the lottery ticket’s journey
“And so, the recovery operation began,” Toscano told ANSA. “We reconstructed the journey of the ticket, without much hope of finding it, as it had already been picked up by a garbage truck.
“Once we located the vehicle, another snag arose: it couldn’t be emptied at our facility due to the risk of waste contamination. We contacted a company in the Bari area that could enable us to sort through the load, and we started searching in the morning.”
After two days of looking through the six tons of garbage, someone somehow managed to locate the winning ticket in a bag full of ruined tickets. He said that if it hadn’t happened on a Sunday, the trash would have already ended up in a landfill.
“Among them was the stub we were looking for, which was miraculously still in one piece,” Toscano said.
Toscano said that after touching the winning lottery ticket in hopes it would bring him luck and then returning it to the owner, he purchased a scratch card while having coffee with some of his workers.
“The result was we took home 50 euros,” he said, adding, “This story is nothing short of miraculous.”