06 October 2023 , 20:09
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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’!"
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Tammie said she can't believe what happened is real (Getty Images)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.
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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.
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"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.