SACRAMENTO – A Bay Area woman claimed her winning lottery ticket today – just two days before the ticket was set to expire.
The woman – who requested anonymity – had been cleaning her house over the weekend when she came across a few tickets she had forgotten to check. One of them turned out to be the nearly six-month-old ticket, worth $202,556.
The woman says she can’t believe her good fortune – and excellent timing. She has no immediate plans for the money, other than to “put it in the bank.”
The ticket was purchased at the Chevron located at 1501 Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco.
The California Lottery reminds winners to sign the backs of their tickets, keep tickets in a safe place and contact Lottery officials or visit their local Lottery District Office (www.calottery.com/AboutUs/Locations) as soon as possible.
Fantasy 5 offers some of the best odds of any California Lottery game. A player wins the Fantasy 5 jackpot simply by matching five numbers out of a field of 39. Winning numbers are drawn every day. The top prize starts at $50,000 and increases daily until it is hit. Tickets are $1 and can be purchased from any of the more than 21,000 California Lottery retailers (www.calottery.com/locations).
More than 95 cents of every Lottery dollar is returned to the community in the form of contributions to education, prizes and retail commissions. The California Lottery contributes at least 34 cents of every dollar that players spend on Lottery products to public education and returns more than 50 percent of sales to players in the form of prizes. Since its inception in 1985, Lottery players have contributed nearly $21 billion to California schools out of total sales of more than $56 billion. Retailers benefit too, earning $3.6 billion in compensation since 1985.