Story by Danni Scott, Ryan Prosser
A Welsh mum might still walk away with her £12,000,000 lottery jackpot after a shop assistant threw her ticket away.
Kath Main, 46, had played her usual lucky numbers on Saturday, June 6, which turned out to be the winners for that National Lottery draw.
However, when her mum Fiona went to the Londis in Abercynon, she was told they had not won, and the owner chucked the ticket away.
It wasn’t until they saw the winning numbers laid out in the paper with a note saying the jackpot was scooped up in the area of Rhondda Cynon Taf that they realised the error.
Kath told The Sun her winning numbers – 8,10, 26, 30, 35, and 42 – are based on her and husband Marcus’ birthdays, her and Marcus’ age when they started playing, and two random numbers ‘to make it up to six’.
Without her winning ticket, the rugby club secretary must wait until December 3 to claim the cash – assuming nobody else comes forward.
The ticket didn’t scan correctly so was mistakenly binned (Picture: Kath Main)
Kath said she ‘feels sick all the time’ waiting for the payout, having planned to spend some of the money on a Lions rugby tour in New Zealand.
Shop owner Karan Kumar said: ‘The woman came in to check the numbers and there was no beep on the machine, nothing came up on the screen, so we just binned them.’
Lottery play at the South Wales Londis is now suspended but Karan added it would ‘be amazing if [Kath] won.’
A spokesperson for Allwyn, operator of The National Lottery, said: ‘We are the only major lottery which is able to look to pay a winner even if they have lost their ticket.
‘The investigation we conduct is designed to ensure any claim is from the rightful ticketholder.
‘We are then able, at our discretion, to pay that player once the claim period has expired 180 days after the draw.
‘We are proud to pay out millions of prizes as well as raising over £33M for Good Causes each week.’
Lottery winner who threw away £855,000 ticket manages to find it in a pile of rubbish
Kath is slightly more fortunate than an anonymous player in Italy who won €1,000,000 but chucked his ticket thinking it was worthless.
Waste workers helped one winner in Italy reunited with his ticket (Picture: Nicola Roberto Toscano)
The lucky winner had discarded their ticket, believing it to be worthless, after buying it at a shop in Bitonto in the southern Italian region of Puglia.
In reality, it had hit the jackpot with the €1 million (£857,158) win, but due to a misunderstanding, the player threw it away.
But the anonymous player had second thoughts after their relative alerted them to the fact that the numbers they always picked were the winning combination.
Their regular numbers were 2, 4, 8, 10 and 51, the BBC reported.
The winner then tracked their lucky ticket to a lorry which had taken it to a waste site.
Waste workers miraculously struck gold after two days trawling through a huge rubbish heap.
The shop where the player had originally bought the ticket had told him it was ‘non-payable’.
While they believed that to mean he hadn’t won a prize this time, it actually meant his winnings were too large to be processed by the shop.
In another stroke of good fortune, as it was a Sunday, the rubbish had not yet been taken to landfill.
It took until Tuesday for a worker to finally find the piece of paper among the mountain of waste.
Nicola Roberto Toscano, the head of waste management firm North Bari Environmental Services (SANB), said the card had been found with other discarded tickets in a plastic bag.
He explained: ‘Luckily it was a Sunday, otherwise the load would have already ended up in landfill.’
Mr Toscano and his colleagues went out and bought a scratch card to celebrate and won £50.
He wrote on his Facebook: ‘It is often said that waste can be a resource. Well.. there are those that have decided to take this so literally.’
However, despite becoming a millionaire overnight, the lucky winner will now have to stump up the cost of recovering their ticket.
In the UK, winning Lotto tickets go unclaimed each year.
Last week, the National Lottery put out a call for winners of two £1,000,000 Lotto tickets played in Cheshire East and Tameside.
