Alamance County woman found winning lottery ticket before it expired
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Ana Maya, a 32-year-old customer service worker in Graham, must feel like the luckiest person alive after she found her winning lottery ticket less than three weeks before it was set to expire, according to a news release.
Maya had been looking for her winning ticket for more than five months so she could claim her Cash 5 jackpot just before the $532,234 ticket expires on March 6.
The ordeal came to an end after the ticket resurfaced earlier this week. “These last couple of months have been very stressful trying to find it,” Maya said. “I totally forgot where I put it.”
Maya bought the Quick Pick ticket for the Sep. 6 Cash 5 drawing but lost it when she was moving to a new house. She said the ticket went missing after she packed it in one of her moving boxes.
But after months of searching --and with the expiry date closing in-- she finally found the ticket on Tuesday in one of her old notebooks from high school. She said she must have put it in there for safekeeping.
“I was very, very relieved when I finally found it,” Maya said. “That was the last place I would have looked.”
Maya purchased the lucky ticket from Huff’s Interstate on Maple Avenue in Burlington. She claimed her prize Wednesday at lottery headquarters in Raleigh and took home $346,005, according to the statement.
She said she wants to set some money aside for her two small children, pay some bills, invest some, and take a nice vacation.
Cash 5 is one of four lottery games in North Carolina where players have the option of buying their tickets through Online Play, either through the lottery’s website or with the NC Lottery Official Mobile App. Cash 5 tickets are $1 and drawings are held every night. Thursday’s jackpot is $464,000.
Winners have 180 days to claim their prize before it expires.
Ticket sales from draw games such as Cash 5 make it possible for the lottery to raise more than $900 million a year for education.
