A father was cleaning out his car when he stumbled across a winning Euromillions ticket worth £55,086 that he had forgotten he purchased in December last year. Dion Davies, 47, from Ceredigion in Wales was doing a quick check of his motor before a valet earlier this month when he made the lucky discovery in his sun visor and decided to check his numbers.
Dion had managed to match all five numbers, which he chose as they matched the birthdays of family members, along with one lucky star in the Euromillions draw which had taken place on Tuesday, December 20. He was unaware that The National Lottery had officially announced in January that the winning ticket remained unclaimed, Wales Online reports.
After finding the winning ticket, Dion told his wife Ifana before the couple called to make the claim and were over the moon to hear that Dion was a winner. The actor had bought the ticket at a local Tesco while he was starring in a Christmas pantomime production of Sleeping Beauty at The Torch Theatre in Milford Haven.
The thrilled 47-year-old said that if he had cleaned his car himself, he probably wouldn't even have bothered checking the numbers. He explained: "I needed to clean the car both inside and out because it was in a terrible state after lots of journeys.
"So I took it to get valeted, at which point the guy asked me to take all of my belongings out before he started - just in case he threw away something that was valuable. And I'm so glad he did because I found a multi lottery ticket in my sun visor that I had bought in December from Tesco in Milford Haven where I was performing in the panto.
"I then took it to the Spar shop in Tregaron and the chap there said I needed to call the number on the back of the final ticket because it was a winner." Describing how the phone call went, he said: "When the person at the Lottery said it was a winner, we all went - along with a neighbour - to get some lunch together, which of course included some glasses of fizz."
Dion is ironically currently rehearsing for a play he co-created called The Bet. It revolves around a man who lost a potential life-changing fortune by not putting money on the Welsh horse, Norton's Coin which was an unlikely winner at the 1990 Cheltenham Gold Cup with odds of 100-1. He has also appeared in BBC's Torchwood and Ruth Jones' Stella.
He now plans to take a trip to Italy this year with his wife and their 15-year-old son. The sci-fi fan is also hoping to take his son to the annual international Comic-Con convention in San Diego, USA.
A spokesperson for Camelot UK Lotteries Limited said, "Thanks to National Lottery players, £30M is generated each week for National Lottery-funded projects. This money helps support everything from the local charity making a difference where you live through to helping our nations' athletes win medals at last summer’s Commonwealth Games.
"To date, £47BN has been raised for National Lottery Good Causes, with more than 670,000 individual grants awarded. Players can buy and check their tickets online by downloading the National Lottery app or at national-lottery.co.uk."
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