A Gold Coast man's routine cleanup has led to a life-changing discovery when he found a Saturday Gold Lotto ticket worth over $1.4 million, dated back to January 2024, left languishing in his drawer.
The surprised winner from Coolangatta held one of the seven division one winning entries in Saturday Gold Lotto draw 4431 on Saturday 6 January 2024.
As his entry was not registered to a player card, the lotto officials were unable to identify or contact the mystery winner for months.
He will bank a total prize of $1,428,599.43.
“How about that! How about that! That’s amazing!” the winning man laughed when his prize was confirmed by a lotto official.
“When I go to buy my ticket each week, my wife always says to me, ‘make sure you buy the winning one’, and this time, I didn’t disappoint her!
“I was bored on Tuesday night, so I decided to check some old tickets.
“This ticket has been sitting in my drawer with a wad of about 10 other tickets I hadn’t got around to checking.
“I decided to pull them out and was just going through them manually, checking the numbers off.
“With this ticket, I could see there was a bit of a run of numbers and then… woah!
“I woke my wife up and said, ‘Look at this! Tell me that I’m lying. Check the numbers! Check the numbers. Tell me I’m wrong!’. We just couldn’t believe it.
“It certainly makes you think about what if I hadn’t checked the ticket or had lost it!
“This is just incredible. It allows us to help our children – they’re in their 20s and this can help them get started in life.
“We have been wanting to plan a trip to Europe. I was happy to go in Economy, but my wife wanted to go Premium Economy. I think we’ll now go better than that!”
The winning entry was purchased at Lotto Express Kiosk The Strand Coolangatta, 72-80 Marina Parde, K104 The Strand, Coolangatta.
The winning numbers in Saturday Gold Lotto draw 4431 on 6 January 2024 were 17, 12, 36, 42, 13 and 34, while the supplementary numbers were 41 and 38.
Across Australia, there were seven division one winning entries in Saturday Gold Lotto draw 4431 – four in New South Wales and one each in Queensland, Victoria, and South Australia.
