Virginia Woman Wins Lottery Twice in 1 Week: ‘I’m in Disbelief!’
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Lady Luck was on one Virginia woman’s side — not once, but twice in October.
Gloucester resident Jennifer Minton won $50,000 playing the Virginia Lottery’s Safari Quest online game in mid-October. Little did she know that one week later, she’d be winning again — but this time the nearly $1 million jackpot, lottery officials said.
Minton told lottery officials that she had been sitting around a campfire, playing the same game on her mobile device, when she noticed the jackpot reset. She said that she recalled thinking in the moment, “Dang, somebody just hit. They are so lucky!”
However, she soon realized that the jackpot of $912,936 was visible on her own screen and that she had indeed been the lucky someone who won it.
“I’m in shock!,” she told lottery officials about the win. “I’m in disbelief!”
Safari Quest is one of the games available via the Virginia Lottery’s app, in which people must match symbols on a 5 x 3 grid. If they receive three bonus symbols, they can activate the bonus wheel where they could win a progressive jackpot.
Ticketing price for the game is between $.20 and $50 to play and the current jackpot following Minton’s win is estimated at just a little over $300,000.
Lottery officials noted that profits from the Virginia Lottery go toward the state's K-12 public schools. So far, it has raised more than $867 million this fiscal year, with 10% of funding going toward the schools’ budget.
About $2.7 million was raised to fund schools in Minton’s native city, Gloucester, last year.
The case of lightning striking twice is a little less common when it comes to lottery games played on an app compared to the classic way of buying a lottery ticket. Several people have won multiple jackpots over the years by buying lottery tickets with the same ticket number.
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In March, an Australian couple won two $1 million prizes on separate tickets in the same lottery drawing after a man purchased two lottery tickets with the same numbers to make up for not buying the tickets the previous week.
The following month, a Cape Cod-based mother and son won a $100,000 prize three times after using the same set of lucky numbers on three lottery tickets.
