Man Wins $9 Million On Accidental Illinois Lottery Ticket Buy

Oct 22, 2024

Talk about a happy mistake.

Normally, when mistakes happen to us, they're not good ones. But as a release from the Illinois Lottery says, that isn't the case for one man.

The player, who is choosing to remain anonymous after his win, didn't mean to buy a Lotto ticket. He was trying to buy a ticket for a different Illinois Lottery game at the Jewel-Osco at 140 West Lake Street in Addison.

The man says it was just a normal day, he was going about his business getting groceries, and he was getting frustrated at the lottery machine in the store. He told Illinois Lottery:

I actually wanted to buy a ticket for a different game and the machine got stuck on Lotto. I was a bit frustrated. I said, ‘What is going on? The machine won’t give me the right game!’ So I decided I may as well buy the Lotto ticket.

The ticket matched the numbers from the August 24th drawing, scoring the frustrated grocery shopper $9.2 million.

He waited a month to claim his prize but he was pretty thankful for the broken machine in the end.

The morning after the drawing, I scanned the ticket at a machine to check if it was a winner. When the machine showed the $9.2 million prize amount, I couldn’t believe it! I looked at my wife and she was completely speechless. We are laughing over how angry I was at the broken machine – and we're so grateful for how it all turned out.

The Addison Jewel-Osco that sold the ticket will get $92,000. This is the 2nd-largest prize won on the Lotto game in Illinois this year. In February, a ticket bought in Park Ridge won $10.4 million.

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