Man Leaves Winning $237M Lottery Ticket In Store By Mistake, Stranger Returns It

On average, the odds of you winning a six-number lottery are 1 in 14… million. That means on paper, you have to buy 14 million lottery tickets to get a 100 percent chance of winning. In theory, it’s discouraging— in practice? Well, gambling is fun. So when one man won $237 million, he was ecstatic, even more so when he left his lottery ticket in the store– because a stranger returned it.

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Michael J. Weirsky from Warren County, New Jersey has been unemployed for 15 years and had just gotten divorced last year. Life can be unfair at times, so Weirsky decided to bet on a Mega Millions jackpot for an instant chance at a better life. He bought a lottery ticket from QuickCheck, a store near him and went home.

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To Weirsky’s surprise, one of the tickets he bought showed a lot of matching numbers, so he checked it with the nearest retailer and surprise, surprise, he won $237 million! Weirsky even recalled that he had actually left that winning ticket in the store before he checked it out because he was distracted. Thankfully, another customer reminded him to grab his lottery ticket.

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“I just didn’t believe it. I just didn’t believe that it was me, after all these years of playing, I finally had something that said you’re a big winner of more than two dollars,” claimed Weirsky. Turns out, the lottery ticket did more than give him money, it also might have given him his ex-wife back. In fact, she immediately contacted Weirsky after learning what he won.