Michigan man tried to pay for pop with old Powerball tickets. Then a cashier discovered he'd been carrying a $1M ticket for months

“I recently stopped at the party store to get a pop but realized when checking out that I didn’t have enough cash on me,” Vander Lugt told Michigan Lottery.

Vander Lugt said that instead of using a card to pay, he took some Michigan Powerball tickets out of his wallet “that [he] knew [he] had won at least a few bucks on.”

That’s when he got the surprise of a lifetime.

“She scanned each of the tickets and said one came back with a message to file a claim at the lottery office, so I looked up the winning numbers for that drawing when I got in my car. I recognized the numbers as soon as I saw them and started freaking out! I can’t believe I had this ticket in my wallet for nearly two months not knowing it was worth $1 million.”

Vander Lugt’s winning ticket was from a draw on Aug. 8 of this year.

The 54-year-old winner told Michigan Lottery that his plans for his winnings were to pay off his house and to invest.

Unclaimed winnings

While Vander Lugt eventually realized he’d won, albeit two months later, there are winners out there who aren’t so lucky.

One lottery expert says that billions of dollars in winnings go unclaimed every year.

In a report from 2018, Brett Jacobson told CNN that unclaimed lottery prizes for the 12 months ending June 2017 totaled a whopping $2.89 billion (Jacobson collected data from all the state lottery commissions, to use for an app he runs, according to CNN).

The report notes that while most unclaimed prizes are small (only a few dollars), secondary prizes for some draws can go into the millions.

“People don’t even realize there are secondary prizes,” Jacobson told CNN.

Jacobson’s data showed that there were 167 prizes of $1 million or more that went unclaimed in fiscal 2017, CNN reported, adding that in some states, lotteries have a six-month deadline for prizes to be claimed.

Some question whether lottery agencies could do more to make sure that winnings don’t go unclaimed.

What can be done to help?

An article for Lottery USA, an independent lottery results site, suggests that making deadlines to claim prizes more readily available could help, perhaps by printing deadlines to claim prizes on the tickets themselves.

Lottery USA also suggests that apps from state lotteries that let players scan and register paper tickets could also help with the unclaimed prize problem.