- A woman in Italy discarded a Rs 10.9 crore lottery ticket after a false non-payable message
- The ticket was mistakenly thrown in the garbage and collected by waste workers
- Waste company SANB traced and stopped the garbage truck carrying the ticket
A lottery winner had the luckiest of reprieves in Italy after she accidentally threw away a Rs 10.9 crore (€1 million) ticket in the garbage, only for the waste workers to recover it two days later. The anonymous player threw the ticket in a shop in Bitonto, southern Italy, after checking their numbers and being told it was "non-payable".
The "non-payable" message appears when the prize is too high to be paid out by the shop. After the woman returned home from the store, a family member informed her that her regular numbers 2, 4, 8, 10, and 51 had helped her win the lottery. The woman always played the same numbers, as they were associated with a loved one, according to a report in BBC.
The newly-crowned winner immediately ran back to the shop, only to discover the ticket had already been thrown away and the rubbish collected.
Desperate to retrieve the ticket, the woman and her family approached Roberto Nicola Toscano, the administrator of waste management company SANB. "We reconstructed the journey of the ticket, without much hope of finding it, as it had already been picked up by a garbage truck," he said.
Fortunately, Toscano and his team managed to trace and stop the correct truck. Due to the risk of hazardous material in the waste, the vehicle was taken to a specialist company equipped for such searches. Workers combed through the rubbish for more than a day, turning up various tickets and stubs before finding the one they were after.
"Among them was the stub we were looking for, which was miraculously still in one piece," Toscano said.
When Toscano called to tell the woman that the ticket had been found, "she cried with emotion," he said. "I would have hugged her, but we were on the phone."
Although the relief came with a catch. Since SANB is a public agency, the woman had to sign an agreement to cover all the additional expenses for the search operation. The gamble, however, paid off in the end.
