Kansas man forgets his $1 million lottery ticket at a gas station — what the staff did was just unreal
Luck has a major part to play as far as winning a lottery goes, but the choices that people make determine if the money is enough to fulfill their dreams. There have been instances where people let almost half of their winnings go to claim a lump sum amount, and in some cases, people lose all the money due to a single error. A Kansas resident would've lost a million dollars if not for the honesty of a gas station employee, who tracked him down and returned the winning lottery ticket. The winner had bought three lottery tickets at the gas station but left the third one at the counter. Andy Patel who was working the register that night decided to check the abandoned ticket out of curiosity and found out that it had won $1 million.
Thankfully Patel knew the person who had left it behind and made it his mission to track down the winner and return the ticket to him. Patel drove around the neighborhood almost every day in hopes of finding the owner's car and giving him the good news.
After a while, he lost hope but miraculously spotted the customer driving out of the neighborhood one day. Luckily, the Patels managed to get the customer's attention after following his car for a while. When they broke the news to the owner, he started shaking with gratitude. People later asked Andy Patel what motivated him to find the owner and give him the winnings instead of keeping it to themselves he explained that he believed in good deeds and karma. Karma did work and Patel was given a helping hand prize from a local firm totaling $1,200.
This is not the first time that a lottery winner almost lost the winning ticket. Eric Cotton, a father of two managed to grab his winning lottery ticket from his trousers just before it was washed away. Cotton from Prince George’s County said that his girlfriend is notorious for doing the laundry without checking the pockets for things before washing them. This is why when he saw that his girlfriend was loading the washing machine, he remembered that the four Powerball tickets that he had recently bought were inside the pocket of the pants that were about to get washed.
After saving the tickets, he sat down to scan them one by one on the Maryland Lottery app on his phone. The first three tickets yielded no surprises but that fourth ticket was special. Describing how he revealed the $50,000 win to his girlfriend, Cotton said, "I looked back at her and she said, 'What’s wrong?'" After winning the prize, Eric said that most of it would be going towards his savings to buy a house for his family of four. Additionally, he also planned to throw a big party for his daughter's birthday.
