An Auckland couple has claimed the final winning ticket from Lotto’s must-be-won Powerball draw from nearly a month ago.
They were the last of seven winners to claim their $7.18m prize.
Nearly two weeks after the draw, the husband said he remembered the ticket and checked it on the MyLotto app.
It had been kept in his wife’s handbag for safekeeping.
“The app told me I’d won a major prize and to take the ticket to a Lotto store. I wasn’t sure how much I’d won… but I had a feeling that it was a big amount.”
He reacted by stashing the ticket back in the handbag so they could check it when they went shopping the next day.
Before doing the shopping, they took their winning ticket to the Lotto counter.
“They told us we had won $7 million – we were so excited,” he said.
The couple play Lotto occasionally and picked up a ticket because it was a must-be-won draw.
After buying their ticket, the couple hadn’t paid much attention to the result of the draw, and so didn’t know a winning ticket had been sold at their local store.
After they discovered they had won, the couple called a family meeting to tell their children the news.
“We thought something serious had happened, they don’t usually ask us to get together quickly like that,” said one of their children.
“We all sat around the table waiting and that’s when they told us they had won $7 million with Powerball. We were all so excited for them.
“There were lots of tears for sure. They’ve worked incredibly hard all their lives for us, they really deserve this,” they said.
The family enjoyed a couple of drinks and talked about what they could do with the winnings.
“They’ve slowly been doing bits on the house, and now they can afford to finish the renovations,” said one of the children of their parents.
“We really want them to do something for themselves though. They’ve been talking about a special overseas trip for a long time and now they can do that, it will be amazing for them,” said another.
The man said the win was something that would benefit the whole family.
“It’s all for them – everything has been. It means so much to know that my family will be looked after.”
