Woman turns small lottery win into whopping $170,000 jackpot
A woman in Cheboygan, Michigan used $80 she had already won to buy herself a heap of tickets to win an incredible life-changing Fantasy 5 jackpot prize of $170,000
A lucky woman managed to turn a small lottery win into a massive fortune winning $170,000.
Tammie Pelton first played a free game and won a bonus credit, which she used to play an online lotto game and win £80 ($100). She then used her winnings to buy herself a number of tickets to the Powerball, before the Cheboygan, Michigan, resident noticed the Fantasy 5 jackpot was over $150,000.
The 52-year-old said: "So I purchased a few Fantasy 5 tickets too.” She then landed a £140,000 ($170,000) windfall. "I had to triple-check my account balance to make sure I wasn't seeing things... I woke up my husband and showed him the message. He was confused and asked who won... I yelled ‘we did’!"
A jubilant Tammie says the family is "still having a hard time believing this is real." She said she plans to use the cash to take a long trip with her husband and invest the rest.
It comes after a lucky couple bought a lottery ticket on a whim in Virginia, only to find they had won $1 million. Christine Oberheitmann, who works as a teaching assistant, and her husband had been travelling back to Berlin, Maryland State, and decided to make a pit stop for something to eat while passing through Cape Charles in Virginia.
While inside Sting-Ray restaurant, the Powerball ticket caught Christine’s eye when she saw how big the jackpot had grown. She told local media she couldn’t resist the temptation to buy a ticket when she saw the rolling Powerball jackpot prize had risen to a massive $500million. She opted to play the lucky dip, allowing the computer to randomly select her numbers.
"I typically only play when the jackpot gets big," she said. But Christine never thought that the single ticket she bought at random would have made her a millionaire.
Christine and her husband made a return trip to Virginia to collect their life-changing winnings at the Virginia Lottery Headquarters. "We'll probably stop at the store on the way home to take a selfie,” she said.
The Powerball jackpot on the line Saturday night, meanwhile, is now at $1.4 billion. It is the world’s fifth-largest lottery prize, due to higher interest rates, long odds, fewer ticket sales per drawing and, of course, luck.
A combination of all those factors means that unless there is a winner soon, the jackpot could top the record lottery prize of $2.04 billion won last November by a Powerball player in California.
