How do you lose $100 million? These lottery winners found a way

Imagine you were a billionaire but didn't know it. You woke up day after day, going to work, clipping coupons, and shopping at sales, when the entire time you had a ten-figure net worth.

That was almost the reality for one New Jersey Lottery player who held the winning ticket for the March 26, 2024, Mega Millions drawing with a $1.13 billion jackpot, the fourth-largest jackpot in the game's history.

State lottery officials waited to meet their big new winner…and waited…and waited. While it's common for players not to claim their prize while they make the necessary financial arrangements, months went by, and still no one stepped forward with the winning ticket.

The state lottery ran advertisements and launched a search for the winner, in case it was someone who had forgotten to check their ticket. Finally, nine months after the drawing and just three months before the ticket was set to expire, an anonymous person stepped forward and claimed the massive prize.

We're sure that New Jersey officials let out a sigh of relief when they finally handed out the check, but unclaimed lottery millions are more common than we think. According to California Lottery spokesperson Alex Traverso, 2% of lottery prizes go unclaimed every year in the United States.

These are true stories of the biggest lottery jackpots that were never claimed.

$100 million let down

5, 11, 22, 34, and 40 are both the luckiest and the unluckiest numbers for some poor UK punter who had the winning ticket for a 64 million pound (equivalent to $100 million) EuroMillions jackpot.

The June 8 2012, drawing featured a massive prize, and lottery officials were confident that it wouldn't be long before a winner stepped forward to claim it. That confidence would prove to be misplaced.

This game actually had two winners, and in due time, one player from Belgium cashed in their ticket and collected their money; however, the second player, who bought their ticket in the Stevenage and Hitchin area of Hertfordshire, UK, never stepped forward.

To their credit, officials from Camelot, the company that ran EuroMillions, made an all-out effort to find the winner. They passed out fliers, posted messages on billboards, and even hired a van with the slogan “It could be you!” to drive around the area where the ticket was purchased to jog someone's memory, but unfortunately, whoever the “you” was was never found.

Because the ticket was purchased at the same time as many significant events in Britain, including the Summer Olympics and the Queen's birthday, officials speculated that it may have been purchased by someone traveling through the town, which is just north of London, on their way to some of the events.

The unclaimed prize wasn’t a total loss, though, since it was redistributed to various charities that surely appreciated the unexpected windfall.

Midnight train to Georgia

At some point on June 29, 2011, an unknown person stopped by the Pilot Travel Center in Tallapoosa, a small town in west Georgia, and purchased a Powerball ticket for a drawing with a $77 million jackpot.

This person played the numbers 24-30-45-57-59 and Powerball number 26, which turned out to be the winning numbers. Unfortunately, this person either doesn't like money, lost their ticket, or never bothered to check their numbers, as they never stepped forward to claim their prize within the 180-day claim window.

Because the ticket was purchased at a truck stop, some people have theorized that the winner was an interstate trucker passing through town, who never knew they had a winning ticket.

After no one stepped forward and the ticket expired after six months, Georgia Lottery spokesperson Kimberly Starks said the ticket was the largest unclaimed prize in since the state launched the lottery in 1993 and the largest unclaimed prize in US lottery history.

Without a winner, the prize money was returned to participating Powerball states in proportion to each state's ticket sales for the drawing.

Christmas collapse

Somewhere in New York, maybe pressed down at the bottom of a Christmas stocking or lost in a pile of gift wrap, there is a winning Mega Millions ticket worth $68 million and a player who has no idea they've won generational wealth.

This misadventure began on Christmas Eve, 2002, when New York Lottery officials announced that someone in the state won the December 24 Mega Millions drawing. The state had only added Mega Millions to its game portfolio in May of 2002, and in that six-month window, three players from the Empire State won jackpots.

“Isn't that wonderful? That's the idea we had when we joined the game,” said Carolyn Hapeman, spokeswoman for New York Lottery, shortly after the third grand prize winner was announced.

However, Santa must have buried the third winner's ticket under a lump of coal, because while the first two winners stepped forward almost immediately and claimed their prize, the third one was never heard from.

The mystery begins at a lottery retailer in Brooklyn, where someone purchased a Mega Millions ticket from the Kings Plaza News kiosk with the numbers 8, 24, 39, 43, 52, and Mega Ball 43.

Unlike in the Georgia case, someone did attempt to claim the prize. Dr. Fritzner Bechette of Brooklyn approached lottery officials and told them that he was the rightful winner but that he had lost the ticket in what he termed “a non-retrievable situation”

State officials investigated his claim but stated that his description of the ticket and its purchase location was inconsistent with the lottery's records. Dr. Bechette filed a lawsuit, but because there was no physical ticket, the court ruled that he was not entitled to the money, and no one was awarded the prize.

However, there was at least one winner from the entire fiasco. The newsstand owner who sold the winning ticket still collected a $10,000 sales bonus.

“I'm sad for [the winner],” said Imran Yousaf, 24, a cashier at the Kings Plaza newsstand, “Someone should get it. There are some unlucky people, and maybe they just lost the ticket.”

No gold in the Golden State

On August 8 2015, someone walked into a 7-11 in Chatsworth, California, and bought a ticket for that night’s Super Lotto Plus drawing with the numbers 46-1-33-30-16 and Mega Number 24.

Their odds of winning the $63 million jackpot were one in 42 million, yet somehow, this person defied those astronomical odds and won the top prize.

Notice I use the word “won” and not “collected” because, despite possessing a piece of paper worth a fortune, they never showed up at the state lottery offices to cash in their winning ticket.

As the months ticked by and the deadline for claiming the ticket drew closer, the California Lottery put out advertisements searching for the winner. California Lottery spokesperson Alex Traverso told reporters:

In this case, I don't think there's any reason why anyone would wait, other than the fact that they're trying to locate this ticket, or they're none the wiser that they've won this prize.

Of course, whenever tens of millions of dollars are hanging in the balance, someone is going to try to claim it. A man named Brandy Milliner filed a lawsuit claiming he turned in the winning ticket. Still, state officials sent him a letter stating that his ticket was "too damaged to be reconstructed" and that "the lottery is unable to process your claim."

However, Traverso refuted all of Milliner's claims. Traverso explained:

We checked it out. There's no record of them trying to file a claim. If we denied them, there would be a letter sent by our professional law enforcement investigators who investigate every claim. So there's no record of that, either.

Further investigation of Milliner's alleged ticket revealed that, rather than being purchased in Chatsworth, it was bought from a different 7-11 in Los Angeles in July 2015, one month before the real ticket was purchased.

Based on this evidence, a superior court judge dismissed the lawsuit, and no one was awarded the prize.

Just because the rightful winner didn't claim their prize doesn’t mean everyone walked away empty-handed. The entire jackpot was donated to the general fund for the California public school system, and the retailer who sold the ticket received a $315,000 check.

No thunder down under

The largest outstanding lottery prize is currently a $100 million jackpot for the Australian version of Powerball. The Lott, the organization that runs Australia's lottery, announced that someone had won the massive grand prize on June 12, 2025, but that no one has stepped forward to claim the prize.

They only know that the ticket was purchased from a newsstand in Bondi Junction. While the Lott does give players the option to register their tickets so that it can notify winners, this mystery buyer never registered their ticket and has proven hard to track down.

The Lott says that they do have surveillance footage of someone buying the ticket, but they will not release it publicly because they're worried that it would compromise the verification process and lead to false claims.

However, the Australian Lottery does offer a generous six-year collection window before a ticket expires, so this big winner still has half a decade to claim their prize.

How not to lose a million

While there's no way to know exactly what happened to any of these lottery winners, our reporting suggests it's highly likely they lost their tickets and never knew they were winners in the first place.

We've published numerous stories about people who almost lost winning tickets by throwing them away, accidentally leaving them in clothes they donated, or dropping them on the ground because they thought they were losers, so it's not hard to imagine that some people would do these things and never recover them.

Additionally, it's possible that some people read their numbers wrong and thought a winner was a loser, so you should always use a lottery app to scan your ticket's barcode and determine if you're holding a real winner.

Finally, you should always keep your ticket in a safe place, take a picture of it, and sign the back to help establish ownership.