A lottery player in Italy threw out a €1 million winning ticket, and it took an army of garbage men two days to fish it back out.
Lottery windfalls usually follow a simple script. You buy a ticket, check the numbers, and cash in. One man went through the script twice, as he recently won the lottery for a second time in 15 years without ever meaning to play again. Yet, this Italian lottery case skipped the simple part entirely and turned into a full-blown salvage operation instead.
Garbage hunt saves €1 million lottery ticket
As reported by the BBC, the mix-up began in Bitonto, a town in Italy’s Apulia region, when an anonymous player checked their numbers at a local shop and got a “non-payable” message on the machine.
That message actually meant the prize was too large for the shop to pay out directly, but the player read it as a loss, pocketed the disappointment, and tossed the ticket. Only later did a relative point out that the numbers, 2, 4, 8, 10 and 51, had come up. Waste boss Roberto Nicola Toscano called the resulting recovery mission “nothing short of miraculous.”
SANB, the company that handles Bitonto’s waste collection, tracked down the bin before its haul could be compacted. The truck had been out on a Sunday round, which spared the load an immediate trip to landfill. Workers then spent two days combing through it.
They were hunting for one small scrap of paper somewhere inside a mountain of rubbish, and they found it Tuesday morning, tucked inside a torn bag alongside other damaged tickets. The team cheered as though they had won the jackpot themselves.
The winner, who had signed a declaration agreeing to cover search costs, will foot the bill for the rescue. Toscano and his colleagues later bought a scratch card as a joke, and won €50.
Stray lottery tickets keep causing chaos well beyond Italy. Earlier this year, a Circle K employee in Arizona found himself in a legal fight after cashing in a customer’s abandoned $13 million ticket, proof that a ticket left behind can turn into a headache for everyone involved.
I’m Abhishek Sharma, an author at TigerJek.com. I enjoy exploring games, testing different strategies, and turning what I learn into clear, useful guides. My goal is to help players understand the game better and improve without the usual confusion.
