A woman in Italy who mistakenly binned a lottery ticket worth €1million (£850,000) managed to retrieve it after spending two days rummaging through heaps of foul-smelling rubbish.
The unnamed winner had checked her numbers at a shop in Bitonto, Puglia, where the machine displayed a “non-payable” message.
She assumed the ticket was a dud and discarded it.
The error message actually indicated her prize was too large for the shop to pay out.
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Her family later confirmed that her regular numbers – two, four, eight, 10, and 51 – had all come up, sparking a frantic effort to recover the ticket.
She hurried back to the shop but was told the ticket had already been disposed of alongside the day’s other rubbish.
The desperate winner then reached out to SANB, the local waste collection firm, which agreed to help out.
“And so the recovery operation began,” said Roberto Nicola Toscano, the company’s director, who called the episode “nothing short of miraculous”.
The search was only possible because the ticket was thrown away on a Sunday.
“Luckily it was a Sunday, otherwise the load would have already ended up in landfill,” he told Italian TV network TGCom24.
Staff tracked the ticket’s journey from the shop to a processing facility.
However, the operation hit obstacles along the way.
“Once we located the vehicle, another snag arose: it couldn’t be emptied at our facility due to the risk of waste contamination,” Mr Toscano revealed.
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The company brought in a separate firm near Bari to help sort through the load.
“We contacted a company in the Bari area that could enable us to sort through the load, and we started searching in the morning.”
After two days of picking through refuse, a worker finally spotted the ticket amid what Mr Toscano described as “a mountain of rubbish”.
“It was in a bag along with other damaged tickets: this was one of the few intact ones.”
Before handing the ticket back, Mr Toscano gave it a touch in hopes of absorbing some of its fortune.
He and several colleagues then bought a scratchcard together.
“The result was that we took home €50,” he said.
The winner signed a declaration agreeing to cover the costs of the entire search operation.
Mr Toscano later reflected on the saga in a social media post.
“This was a truly unique story about an incredibly lucky person who hit the bullseye but was then very unlucky because the ticket ended up in the rubbish, thrown away by accident, and who in the end was incredibly lucky all over again.”
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