A lottery player in southern Italy nearly lost €1 million because a shop terminal told him his ticket was worthless. It took two days of digging through garbage to prove that it was not.
The anonymous man bought the ticket in Bitonto and checked his numbers at the shop where he bought it. The terminal returned a message saying the ticket was non-payable, and he threw it away. According to BBC News, that message appears when a prize is too large for the shop to pay out directly. The player did not know that.
He went home without a second thought. Then his family pointed out that his regular numbers, 2, 4, 8, 10, and 51, had been drawn in the winning combination. The realization sent him back to the shop, where he learned his ticket had already been tossed into the trash and collected by a garbage truck.
Roberto Nicola Toscano, director of SANB, the refuse company that handles waste collection in the area, described what happened next. The bin lorry was located before its load could be compacted for disposal. "Luckily it was a Sunday, otherwise the load would have already ended up in landfill," Toscano told Italian broadcaster TGCOM24.
The truck was escorted to a special site, and workers began searching through what Toscano called a "mountain of waste" for a single small piece of paper. The search stretched across two days before a waste worker found the ticket Tuesday morning.
"It was in a hole-ridden bag along with other damaged tickets: this was one of the few intact ones," Toscano told Italian news agency Ansa.
"This story is nothing short of miraculous," he added.
The winner had signed a declaration before the search began agreeing to cover the cost of the recovery operation. That bill is now coming due.
In a small footnote to the story, Toscano and some colleagues bought a scratch card as a joke while the search was still underway. They won €50.
