The men claim the lottery took too long to post the winning numbers on its website

Jun 27, 2014 12:39 GMT  ·  By
Men sue the New Jersey Lottery after throwing away winning ticket worth $1 million
   Men sue the New Jersey Lottery after throwing away winning ticket worth $1 million

Salvatore Cambria and Erick Onyango of Suffern, a village in New York, US, are here to teach us one very important lesson about how to navigate life's ups and downs. Here's what this lesson is: when at fault, blame others. Better yet, get a lawyer and drag them to court.

Media reports say that these two men are now suing the New Jersey Lottery on the grounds that it took too long to update its website and that this ended up costing them a whopping $1 million (approximately €0.73 million).

According to Sky News, it was only a few weeks ago – on March 23, to be more precise – that Salvatore Cambria and Erick Onyango visited a local 7-Eleven convenience store and got three tickets for the drawing on the very same day.

Upon returning home later that cursed March 23, Erick Onyango contacted Salvatore Cambria and asked him to visit the New Jersey Lottery's website and check to see what the day's winning numbers had been.

Salvatore Cambria is not one to say “no” to his friend – especially not when cold hard cash is involved – and did just that. Specifically, he logged on to the Lottery's website very soon after the 11 p.m. drawing, the two men explain.

However, the numbers that were then shown online did not coincide with the numbers on the two men's tickets. Hence, Salvatore Cambria did what anybody else would have done when faced with such a disappointment: he threw away the ticket in his possession.

“So I took my ticket, which was worth one million dollars, and I put it in a cigarette pack and put it in the garbage in my bedroom,” the man has reportedly told the press in a recent interview. The bad news is that, by the looks of it, the ticket that he threw away was a winning one.

Thus, the two men now say that, when Salvatore Cambria checked the Lottery's website, the numbers shown were the ones from the drawing on March 22. They claim that the winning numbers were displayed later on, and that, by then, they no longer had the ticket.

“By the time they realized what happened, their money was headed to a garbage dump somewhere in Canada,” Edward Logan, who these two really unlucky lottery enthusiasts hired as their lawyer, explains in a statement on the incident.

Since Salvatore Cambria and Erick Onyango still have the other two tickets that they purchased on March 23 and lottery tickets have sequential serial numbers, the two men hope that they will manage to prove that the winning one, whose serial number puts it in between these two, was also theirs.

Information shared with the public says that this case was brought to court earlier this week. The Lottery Commission has until now refrained from commenting on this incident and the men's allegations.