14 DAY TRIAL // A woman from Melbourne, Australia got lucky at the lottery not once, but twice in the same draw. She bought two tickets playing the exact same numbers.
The unidentified lottery winner mentioned that she simply forgot that she had bought the ticket. She buys a ticket for the TattsLotto on a weekly basis, and this time she thought she hadn't bought one.
“I buy a TattsLotto ticket every week, and I just forgot that I'd already bought one for the weekend when I went to another shop to buy the second one,” she tells The Age.
Her secret for picking the same numbers is a play on her family's birth dates, which she repeats.
“I always play the same numbers made up of family birthdays," she says.
Her total winnings squared up over $835,000 (€635,400) since she won about $413,000 (€314,300) per ticket, plus cumulative earnings.
Now she plans to pay the entire mortgage to her house and the double winning allows her to enjoy the rest of the prize.
“Half of that $835,000 will go straight towards the mortgage … I guess it's a good thing we won twice so there's some prize money left over. It will be such a relief to be debt-free,” she explains.
She didn't watch the Saturday night drawing, and she was alerted about the win by telephone. She was at work in the CBD and she initially thought that she was the victim of a phone prank.
“This isn't a hoax is it? Hang on, I'll have to take my coat off, it's really hot all of a sudden!” she told the operator.
“I'll have to go and ring hubby now to break the news,” she remembered saying.
Ten winning division-one entries were reported in Victoria after the draw, with other owners being residents of East Doncaster, Heidelberg, Glenroy and St Albans.