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A million-dollar lottery ticket purchased at a Matthews gas station is set to expire Wednesday. The ticket would be the largest ever to go unclaimed in North Carolina. Some lucky person walked into the Market Express on Monroe Road on August 20 and picked all five winning numbers for the MegaMillions lottery: 4-13-20-29-48.
And that's where the luck ended.
That person has yet to claim the million dollar prize and Market Express manager Esther Roach isn't too hopeful. "It had to have been someone that threw it away in error," says Roach. "I'm sure."
If the winner doesn't show up at North Carolina Education Lottery headquarters in Raleigh by 5:00 p.m. Wednesday to redeem the ticket, it'll be the largest prize ever to go unclaimed in the state. Only 16 tickets worth more than $100,000 have gone unclaimed since North Carolina started its lottery. The largest to this point was worth $800,000.
Roach is doing everything she can to jog the memory of her customers, including posting a big sign above the lottery machine at her store. It says, "Who's got the million dollar ticket?" So far the sign has produced no winner, but Roach says she has several customers who swear they had the winning ticket and lost it. If they don't find it by Wednesday, they're out of luck.
Unclaimed lottery prize money goes into the state's education lottery fund and toward helping cover a shortfall in Medicaid.