Lottery player in Italy enlists the help of waste workers after throwing away a winning ticket worth over $1 million. They found it — then won, too

They had checked the ticket at the shop, but were told it was “non-payable” and tossed it out.

When the player returned home, the report says, their relative pointed out that the numbers they always play — 2, 4, 8, 10, and 51 — had been drawn.

“This story is nothing short of miraculous,” Roberto Nicola Toscano, director of waste-collection company SANB, told Italian news agency Ansa, BBC reported.

Toscano said the “non-payable” message appears if a lottery prize is too big to be paid out by a merchant.

“It was then that they realized the misunderstanding,” Toscano reportedly said. “So they all went to the shop together and discovered that the tickets had been thrown away and collected by one of our operators.”

The search for the winning ticket

The player got in touch with Toscano’s company, and the garbage truck that had collected the trash containing the ticket was located — before its load was compacted. Toscano noted that this was another lucky break for the player: If it hadn’t been a Sunday, the load would have already been dumped in a landfill.

The truck was taken to a special site where waste workers began to search for, as Toscano put it, a “small piece of paper hidden in a mountain of waste.”

The winner had agreed beforehand to cover the cost of the search.

After two days, a waste worker found the ticket in a haystack, “with the workers cheering as if they had won the prize themselves,” the BBC report says.

“It was in a hole-ridden bag along with other damaged tickets; this was one of the few intact ones,” Toscano reportedly said.

Toscano told BBC News that he couldn’t reveal the winner’s identity, but did say that he and his colleagues thought to try their own luck and buy a scratch ticket as a joke.

But the luck seems to have been contagious, as they won €50, about $57.

Lotto dreams

While it’s fun to hear stories of good luck when it comes to the lottery — and hard not to daydream about what you yourself would do with the money if your ticket was drawn — for many Americans, unrealistic ideas about the odds of winning persist.

The odds of winning a Powerball jackpot, for example, are one in 292.2 million. But a 2019 survey found that 59% of millennials said winning a jackpot “is a reasonable way to retire.”

Another survey, conducted in 2005, found that 21% of Americans thought the most practical way they could accumulate several hundred thousand dollars was by winning the lottery. When the same survey asked respondents about “very important wealth-building strategies for all Americans, 16% said ‘win the lottery.’”

As such, Americans spent $104.7 billion on state-run lottery tickets in 2024, according to Census Bureau data.

But a 2024 analysis by The Economist found that poorer households “spend significantly more, in absolute terms,” on lottery tickets than wealthier households.

“In the poorest 1% of zip codes that have lottery retailers, the average American adult spends around $600 a year, or nearly 5% of their income, on tickets,” The Economist found. “That compares with just $150, or 0.15%, for those in the richest 1% of zip codes.”