Lotto Powerball jackpot goes unstruck, rolls over to $17m for Wednesday draw

Lotto Powerball jackpot goes unstruck, rolls over to m for Wednesday draw

Seven lucky Kiwis took out the top prize in last month’s record $50m Powerball draw.

Other Powerball jackpots won since then include $4.5m won by a MyLotto player in Waikato on June 12 and $5.5m won on June 19 by a physical ticket bought in Waitara.

Those seven winners on June 8 each took home $7.2m in the must-be-won draw.

While two of them had claimed their share of the first prize by the next day on Sunday, June 9, it took until last week for the final winner to come forward and collect their portion of the winnings.

Seven winners won a share of last month’s $50m jackpot lotto prize. Photo / Michael Bradley

One of the children of the winning couple, who wished to remain anonymous, said the family had a meeting to share the happy news.

“They’ve slowly been doing bits on the house, and now they can afford to finish the renovations,” the child said about the winning parents.

“We really want them to do something for themselves though. They’ve been talking about a special overseas trip for a long time and now they can do that, it will be amazing for them,” said another of the children.

It took the family two weeks to find out they had won first prize.

“Because we don’t buy tickets all the time, we usually only check our tickets when we remember to – we weren’t in a rush,” said the winning man.

A couple of weeks passed, and the man remembered the ticket, which was in his wife’s handbag for safekeeping. He dug it out and scanned it using the MyLotto App.

“The app told me I’d won a major prize and to take the ticket to a Lotto store. I wasn’t sure how much I’d won… but I had a feeling that it was a big amount.”

The man stashed their ticket back in his wife’s handbag so they could check it when they went grocery shopping the next day. Before doing the shopping, they took their winning ticket to the Lotto counter.

“They told us we had won $7 million – we were so excited!” he said.