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Has Powerball ticket expired? Do not collect $200,000
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Published: September 4, 2008
If you bought -- and subsequently lost -- a winning lottery ticket would you want to know?
That's the $200,000 question being asked this morning in and around Parker's Stop and Shop on Reidsville Road as the deadline for producing the ticket looms.
Someone who stopped and shopped on Saturday, March 8, paid $1 for a Powerball ticket that hit on the first five numbers in that night's drawing. Because he (or she) didn't match the sixth and final ball, the Powerball, the ticket was worth "only" $200,000 and not the $200 million jackpot.
Still, not bad.
It's a big return on the investment. But nobody has turned it in, and the deadline to do so is 5 p.m. today.
Few things would make store owner Mike Parker happier than if one of his regular customers found that ticket in time to make the drive to Raleigh to claim the prize.
"It'd tickle me to death," Parker said. "The first month or so after we hung that sign that says we sold that ticket and nobody had claimed it, people would come in and say how they were going to go home and look all over for it.
"Somebody must have put it up in a really good spot."
Assume that it is lost
It's not difficult to imagine someone who thought that they might have bought a ticket at the Stop and Shop that fateful Saturday frantically dumping the contents of a junk drawer on a kitchen table or sifting through a week's worth of fetid garbage in an effort to find it.
I would. You would, too. Not finding it would be the ultimate Homer Simpson "Doh!" moment.
As bad as that sounds, here's what's worse: It has happened before -- with bigger prizes.
Some unfortunate soul lost a Powerball ticket worth $600,000 sold in Davidson County on Feb. 28, 2007. Somebody else lost one worth $800,000 that was sold in Troutman on Oct. 17, 2007.
Two other $200,000 Powerball tickets sold in 2006 -- one in Aberdeen and one in Charlotte -- also went unclaimed.
(If you don't play much or are unfamiliar with the game's intricacies, matching the first five numbers while missing the last number -- the Powerball -- nets a $200,000 prize. You can fork over an extra dollar to "Power Play" the ticket, meaning that potential winnings can be multiplied by two, three, four or five, depending on the spin of a wheel on the night of the drawing.)
"As you might imagine, the percentage of winning tickets that go unclaimed is quite small," said Neosha Smith, a spokeswoman for the N.C. Lottery. "Among Cash 5 tickets with winners of $50,000 or more, there have been 149 total winners. Only one has expired and gone unclaimed."
Of the expired winning Powerball tickets with prizes of $50,000, no one has yet to come forward and attempt to claim a prize with an expired ticket.
"We've never heard from anyone, so our assumption is that they may have lost or misplaced those tickets," Smith said.
It's better not to know
Another explanation is that a novice player bought the ticket during one of those frenzied periods when the jackpot ventured into the $200 million neighborhood, saw that he (or she) missed the Powerball number, and didn't understand the rules well enough to know that the ticket was worth $200,000.
Rookie mistake. A colossal boneheaded one.
On the plus side for the rest of us, half of the unclaimed money goes to education and the other half goes back into the prize pool.
Veteran lottery cognoscenti tend to downplay that theory, choosing instead to believe that the winning tickets were indeed lost and that their owners never realized what they had.
For the sake of the person who bought that ticket at Parker's -- and perhaps another one who bought another unclaimed $200,000 winner in Lillington that will expire next Thursday -- let's hope that they never find out.
"I sure wouldn't want to find it later" Parker said. "If I found an old ticket after the cutoff date, I wouldn't even check the (winning numbers). I wouldn't want to know."
■ Scott Sexton can be reached at 727-7481 or at ssexton@wsjournal.com.
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