Woman throws $1million Winning Lottery Ticket in Trash but Still Wins Big thanks to Shop Owner Honesty

Bad beats or big mistakes rarely get rewarded in poker, but in the lottery world it seems there are different rules, a Massachusetts woman who discarded a $1million winning ticket finding that honesty still exists as the store owner corrected her mistake!

Lea Rose Fiega mistakenly threw away a $30 Diamond Millions scratchcard lottery ticket she bought back in March, having skipped a crucial number and thinking the card was worthless.

The card requires players to scratch off 30 diamond symbols, and then ten $10 symbols, and matching them up can win as much as, well, $1million – but only if you do the job right!

“I was in a hurry, on lunch break, and just scratched it real quick, and looked at it, and it didn’t look like a winner, so I handed it over to them to throw away,” Fiega explained.

Fortunately for her, 10 days later the son of the Lucky Stop convenience store’s owner decided to check through the discarded tickets and noticed Fiega’s missing number.

“One evening, I was going through the tickets from the trash and found out that she didn’t scratch the number,” Abhi Shah told WWLP-TV. “I scratched the number and it was $1 million underneath the ticket.”

That’s where the honesty part of the story kicks in, as it would have been simple enough to ‘create’ a new winner of the massive jackpot prize.

However, that’s not what the Shah family did. Instead, knowing Ms. Fiega as a regular customer, they “knew immediately” who the ticket belonged to. What happened next reduced Ms Fiega to tears.

“He came to my office and said ‘my Mom and Dad would like to see you,’” she explained, adding: “I said ‘I’m working,’ and he said ‘no you have to come over.’ So I went over there and that’s when they told me. I was in total disbelief. I cried, I hugged them.”

It was Lea Rose’s second big win of the year, having survived a “near-fatal” bout of Covid-19 back in January, which she described as like “winning the lottery”.

Of the Shah family’s kindness and honesty, she said:

“I mean, who does that? They’re great people. I am beyond blessed.”

That honesty had its own bonus for the Shah’s, the family store receiving a $10,000 bonus from the Massachusetts State Lottery Commission for selling the winning ticket.

Ms Fiega also rewarded them, though how much is unknown, and stated she’d be “saving the rest for retirement.”