An Italian woman threw away a winning lottery ticket worth one million euros; utility workers helped find it
Kyiv • UNN
A woman from the Italian city of Bitonto threw away a lottery ticket, believing it was invalid due to a message about the impossibility of payment. Utility workers manually sorted through the trash and found the ticket, saving a one-million-euro prize.
A resident of the town of Bitonto in southern Italy hit a jackpot of one million euros, but almost lost it due to an unfortunate misunderstanding. After receiving an automatic message at the ticket sales point saying "not eligible for payout," the woman decided her ticket was invalid and threw it away, reports UNN citing DW.
Details
Already at home, the woman, together with family members, double-checked the number combination and realized that everything was fine with the ticket—it was just that the winning amount was too large to be paid out on the spot.
A local waste collection service came to the woman's aid. Its employees reconstructed the route of the discarded trash and organized a search operation. Municipal workers sorted the garbage by hand. At dawn, around 5:30 a.m., one of the workers found the coveted ticket in a torn garbage bag among a multitude of damaged receipts.
"There is something magical in this story!" said the head of the municipal company, Roberto Nicola Toscano, to journalists. According to him, he will never forget how the woman burst into tears of joy when she heard the news of the find over the phone. She had agreed in advance to cover all expenses for the search operation herself.