Garbage collectors in Italy helped find an accidentally discarded winning lottery ticket worth €1 million (approximately 857,158 British pounds).
The player threw away the ticket in a store in Bitonto, southern Italy, after being told that the ticket was “not eligible for payout.” The man realized he had discarded the winning ticket only when a relative pointed out that the numbers drawn were the exact ones he always played.
Two-day search in a “mountain of garbage”
This led to a two-day search in a “mountain of garbage” collected by a garbage truck, reported Roberto Nicola Toscano to the Italian news agency Ansa. “This story is a real miracle,” he added. Toscano explained that the confusion arose because the message “not eligible for payout” appears when the prize amount is too large to be paid out at the store.
When the player returned home, his family informed him that his favorite numbers — 2, 4, 8, 10 and 51 — had won. “That’s when he realized the misunderstanding. So they all went back to the store together and found out that the tickets had been thrown away and collected by one of our workers,” said Toscano, director of SANB, the company responsible for waste collection in the area.
After the player contacted the waste collection company, the garbage truck was located before its contents were compacted for disposal. “Fortunately, it was Sunday; otherwise, the load would have already been at the landfill,” reported the manager to the Italian TV channel TGCOM24. The truck was escorted to a special site where the search began for the “small piece of paper hidden in a mountain of garbage.”
Finally, after a two-day search, a garbage collector found the winning ticket on Tuesday morning. “It was in a torn bag along with other damaged tickets but was one of the few intact ones,” Toscano told the Ansa agency. The cost of the search operation will be charged to the winner, who had previously signed a declaration agreeing to cover the related expenses. Luck even smiled on Toscano and his colleagues: they jokingly bought a scratch card and won €50 (43 British pounds).
Source: BBC World
