August 5, 2026 | 06:12 am
TEMPO.CO, Jakarta – Garbage workers in the city of Bitonto, Italy recovered a €1 million (US$1.15 million) lottery ticket, after having to search through an entire truck full of trash. Waste management company SANB administrator Roberto Nicola Toscano told AFP news agency that the ticket was found "miraculously still in one piece."
Toscano received the panicked call from the woman who had won the big prize and lost it.
The unnamed woman entered the Saturday lottery and on Sunday she went to check her ticket's result at her local shop.
But the machine read "non-payable," a common message indicating the prize was too large for the small retailer to redeem. She mistook the message to say that there were no winnings.
"The winner always played the same numbers, as they were associated with a loved one," Toscano said. According to Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera, the woman's winning combination was 2, 4, 8, 10, and 51. A family member of the woman noticed the combination was the winning one and informed her, but she had already discarded the ticket.
By the time they returned to the shop, a garbage truck had already collected the trash bin that held her ticket.
How did was the ticket found?
After SANB was contacted by the woman, the garbage company moved quickly to reconstruct the journey of the ticket, Toscano told AFP. They were able to identify the correct truck and stopped it.
Combing through collected trash would pose the risk of potentially dangerous material in the waste, so the vehicle was taken to a special site equipped to do the search, Toscano said.
It took the workers one day of "working in conditions that were anything but pleasant" to find the ticket, Toscano told Corriere Della Sera.
Toscano said the woman cried when she found out, over the phone, that the ticket was found.
He told the paper that professionalism, organization, and a great deal of luck made the moment happen, saying the impossible result could not have happened without the garbage workers.
As a SANB is a public entity, the cost of the search would be covered by taxpayers, but Toscano told AFP that the woman had promised to "cover all of the additional costs."
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