Someone in Illinois is $3 million dollars richer, thanks to a lucky scratch-off ticket sold at a suburban Chicago gas station.
According to the Illinois Lottery, the ticket -- a $30, 3,000,000 Cash Fortune scratch-off Instant Ticket -- was sold at a BP Gas station in Mount Prospect, located at 1625 East Euclid Drive.
The retailer is lucky, too, lottery officials said. For selling the winning ticket, the gas station will receive a bonus of one person of the prize amount.
In this case, that comes to $30,000.
“This is such happy news,” store manager Benny Lukose said in a press release. “While we sell a lot of lottery tickets, I can definitely recognize our regular customers - so I bet I’ll know the winner."
According to the release, Lukose plans use the bonus to cover business expenses.
More than 50 million winning Instant Lotto tickets have been sold in 2023 in Illinois, the release said. Recently, that includes a number of big winners in other Chicago suburbs, including a $400,000 ticket sold in Wood Dale, a $2 million ticket sold in Morris and a $3 million ticket sold in Carpentersville.
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Earlier this year, an NBC 5 Investigates report revealed that the Illinois Lottery continued to sell and promote many Instant Games even after the top prizes had been claimed. A spokesperson for the lottery told NBC Chicago that although retailers are notified once a ticket no longer has a top prize, the process can be time consuming.
"As the process involves physically removing hundreds of thousands to millions of tickets from our stores for a particular game, that process can take up to 1 to 3 months to complete," the spokesperson said. "We will continue to look for ways to make this process even better for our players and retailers.”
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According to lottery officials, there are more than 50 different Illinois Lottery Instant Ticket games at over 7,000 retail locations across Illinois.
