A South Auckland woman got the surprise of her life after
a phone call from Lotto NZ led her to find a forgotten bonus
ticket in her handbag – a piece of paper worth a sweet
$500,000.
The woman, who wishes to remain anonymous,
was contacted by Lotto NZ’s winners’ team last week in
relation to a Lotto First Division prize from the draw on 31
May 2025 that was unclaimed.
“I got a call asking if
I had bought a ticket around that time and whether I might
have any old ones lying around,” said the woman. “I had
noticed some tickets in my bag a few days before but assumed
I had already checked them and thought no more about
them.”
After a bit of rummaging through her bag she
found the tickets – one of them being a bonus ticket she
had won in the draw before.
“The person on the phone
read out the winning numbers as I checked them on my ticket
– I had all six and she asked me if I knew what that meant
– but I didn’t.
“That’s when she told me that
matching six Lotto numbers was a First Division prize, and
the prize for that draw was $500,000 – I didn’t know
what to say – I was absolutely speechless and almost in
tears.”
After the call, the woman told her husband
what had happened. The couple checked the ticket on the
MyLotto app and ‘a major prize’ popped up on the
screen.
“That’s when he started to believe it was
true and tucked it into his wallet for safe keeping,” she
said.
“I joked with him saying ‘hey, what’s
wrong with keeping it in my bag – it’s been safe there
for months.’”
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She said the ticket had been in a
zipped pocket of her handbag since the day she got
it.
“It’s been everywhere with me for the past few
months, even on an overseas holiday. I can’t believe I was
basically carrying around a bag with $500,000 in
it.
“I call this my magic bag now,” she
laughed.
The couple are planning to buy their first
home with the money.
“This changes everything for us
– it means we can buy our first home, and I just don’t
have words for how that feels,” she said.
The woman
did have one burning question for Lotto NZ when she claimed
her prize, and that was ‘how did you know the winner was
me?’.
When the ticket went unclaimed for over a
month, the team at Lotto NZ started working behind the
scenes to find the winner using electronic transaction
records.
“When the woman claimed her bonus ticket,
she also bought another ticket using a card, and that card
was registered to a MyLotto account, which had a phone
number listed,” said Lotto NZ Head of Corporate
Communications, Will Hine.
“That gave us enough
information to reach out and ask some questions – and
luckily she still had the ticket.
“If she’d lost
the ticket, we would have needed to go through a full
investigation to confirm ownership – like we did earlier
this year with another Auckland
winner.
“We’re really happy to know that this
prize is going to make such a difference in their lives,
helping them into their first home,” said
Will.
