A million reasons to rejoice

An Auckland man who lost his wallet for three days had a million reasons to celebrate when he finally found it under his bed — it was holding a winning Lotto ticket.

The man, who wished to remain anonymous, said he was brought to tears last weekend after learning the ticket he put in his wallet for safekeeping won Lotto first division and a prize of $ 1 million.

“It was such a crazy week last week, I actually couldn’t find my wallet for three days.

“When you lose things like that you normally expect to find them pretty quickly. But by Saturday afternoon, I was starting to think about cancelling my cards. The Lotto ticket didn’t even cross my mind,” he said.

He bought the ticket from Pak’nSave Mt Albert for the Wednesday draw, and after finding his wallet and the ticket he checked it on the Lotto NZ app.

“I scanned my ticket and it came up with the message ‘ Major Prize Winner’. I thought I might have won $ 5000 so I took a screenshot and sent it to my mum. She messaged back saying I had better go down to the dairy to check.”

He burst into tears when he was told how much he’d won.

“If I had known I was going to win $ 1 million, I might not have brought the kids with me, but thankfully they knew that Dad was crying for a good reason.

“We went back to my house afterwards and we decided to splash out and order some takeaways from the fancy Italian restaurant up the road. It was such a special moment sharing it with everyone.”

He plans to use the money to help out family, pay off debt and is thinking about going on his first overseas trip.