A man drove around for a fortnight with a winning Lotto ticket in his car before he remembered to check it, only to discover it was worth $500,000.
A Lotto spokesperson said the Otago man had purchased his ticket midway through March and then forgotten about it for 11 days, until he was reminded about it by a friend.
"My friend saw my Lotto ticket in my car and said, 'You know there was a big win in the area, you should really check that'," said the man.
"I was on my way home from a weekend away with my partner, and we decided to check the ticket as we passed through Queenstown.
"I had a few tickets to check, so I put them through the self-checker.
"When I got to the second ticket the winning noise went off and 'First Division prize' popped up on the screen…but I just kept scanning the rest of the tickets, I didn't know what was going on."
The man took all the tickets up to the counter to double check.
"I handed my ticket to the lady at the counter and her jaw dropped. It was then I thought, 'Wow, this must be a bit more than I thought'."
He said his partner came to the counter and looked at the prize amount.
"She thought it said $50,000, and so I had to tell her to double check the number of zeros."
The winner, who wants to remain anonymous, said he was so overwhelmed with excitement he couldn't drive and had to get his partner to take the wheel for the rest of the journey.
"My brain has been going 100 miles an hour, I've hardly had any sleep since finding out the news," he said.
A Lotto spokesperson said the man was looking to use his winnings to build his first home.
It comes as the latest mega-rich $28 million Lotto Powerball jackpot was scooped by an Auckland grandmother at the weekend.
The woman thought nothing of the ticket that was sitting in her handbag until she saw the owners of the store in the headlines.
The life-changing moment where she discovered she had the winning ticket didn't come until Monday, while she was out shopping and had decided to check a few tickets she had piled up.
"One of them won me a bonus ticket, which I thought was pretty good – then when I scanned the next one I saw 'First Division' appear on the screen," she said.
"I just couldn't make sense of it, so I took the ticket to the counter and asked the lady to check it again for me. That's when she called the store owner over and they pointed at the sign saying 'big winner sold here' and whispered to me 'that's you!'
The jackpot-winning ticket was bought from Meg Star in Henderson and included a one-sixth share of Lotto Division 1 - the other five players not having that lucky Powerball number.
