An unidentified Pennsylvania man won the lottery for $1.25 million, only to throw out his winning tickets because he thought he lost, the York Daily Record reported.
The man bought 25 Quinto tickets on March 13, 2013 from a grocery store in York for around $100. The store's owner said the man comes in and buys the tickets every day. He also plays the same numbers: 4,3,4,1,8. Those numbers turned out to be the winning combination that day, but the man never came forward to claim the prize. Instead he threw out the tickets because he thought he lost again, the store owner told the newspaper.
Now a year later, the deadline to claim the money has passed.
"He was mad," Wendy Hinton, owner of Zhou Grocery where the man bought the tickets, told the York Daily Record. When he found out, "he was so mad he played $400 that day."
The man always purchased between 20 and 25 tickets daily, Hinton said. He also plays the same numbers, but Hinton said she did not know why they were important.
Each ticket was worth $50,000, which comes out to $1.25 million. The unclaimed lottery will stay with Pennsylvania's Lottery Fund.
The state Lottery sent a news release in February 2013, a month before the deadline, letting the public know that the jackpot had to be claimed by March 13.
"Check the drawer by the sink, under the couch and in the glove box," lottery officials warned in the press release, according to the newspaper.
Lottery spokeswoman Lauren Bottaro was sad when she learned the man lost his chance to win.
"Oh no," Bottaro told the York Daily Record. "Wow."
Bottaro said winning lottery jackpots rarely go unclaimed, making up less than one percent of tickets sold in Pennsylvania.
"We do what we can" to alert winners, Bottaro told the York Daily Record. "But sometimes it's just not enough."
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