Winners leaving fortunes on table
2 lottery ticket holders must claim prizes by tonight or forfeit them
At 4:31 p.m. today, a winning $1 million Mega Millions ticket — perhaps stuffed into a drawer somewhere — will lose its potential, becoming the lottery equivalent of Cinderella's pumpkin.
Just like that, the ticket purchased in January from a Dundalk convenience store by an unknown player will transform from a true-life fairy tale into — poof — a memorable missed opportunity.
It seems unimaginable, but someone could leave a million bucks on the table.
The Maryland Lottery gives winners 182 days to claim prizes in drawing games such as Mega Millions and Powerball. While most come forward, Marylanders routinely fail to collect millions of dollars a year in these and other games, according to lottery agency records.
Since July 2013, $62.6 million in winning tickets sold in Maryland have gone unclaimed in such games as Powerball, Mega Millions, Pick 3, Pick 4 and instant games known as “scratch-offs.”
Stunningly, July has the potential to see two million-dollar tickets lapse.
In January, someone walked into a 7-Eleven in Bladensburg and shelled out $2 for a Powerball ticket that matched all five of the white balls, but not the “Power Ball.” There's been no sign of the player as the July 13 claiming deadline nears.
“This is unusual,” Maryland Lottery spokeswoman Carole Bober Gentry said Thursday. “It's not often you have two $1 million prizes unclaimed like this. Most people pay attention to prizes of this size. That's a million dollars.”
The winning Dundalk ticket, bought at a Royal Farms store on German Hill Road, matched five balls, but not the “Mega Ball,” in a Jan. 8 drawing.
“Missing Millionaire!!!” read signs posted inside and outside the busy store this week by lottery officials hoping to alert the winner to the precarious state of their good fortune.
The yellow signs contain the winning numbers — 11, 39, 51, 57 and 75 — and this frantic notation:
“There's an unclaimed ticket out there and time is RUNNING OUT!!!”
Lottery officials said they don't know why the winner had not appeared.
“We're eager to award these prizes and make two new Maryland Lottery millionaires,” said Gordon Medenica, the state's lottery and gaming director.
In some states, players want to avoid calling attention to their newfound riches. But Maryland is among six states in which winners' identities may be kept private. Its rules allow wary winners to hide their faces behind oversized checks and to use creative monikers instead of their names in promotional photos posted on the lottery agency's website.
George Loewenstein, an economics and psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said the volume of unclaimed prizes “reinforces the idea that people who buy lottery tickets are not so much purchasing a small probability of winning a large amount as they are ‘buying a dream.' Most people don't win, and it seems that some of the people who do win don't collect their winnings. But everyone who buys a ticket gets a license to fantasize, however briefly, about getting rich quickly.”
The Dundalk winner has until 4:30 this afternoon to claim the prize at state lottery headquarters on Washington Boulevard. That's when the office closes for the day.
The lottery says the store owners will receive the customary $2,500 bonus for selling a million-dollar ticket even if the winners don't surface.
Lottery revenues can mean thousands of dollars a week for convenience stores, liquor stores, service stations and other lottery dealers. The retailers keep 5.5 percent of sales and receive a 3 percent commission on tickets cashed.
Winning tickets above $5,000 must be cashed at the lottery office rather than the store. Almost every weekday, at least one winner arrives at lottery headquarters, where they are ushered into a reception area. Staff members from the lottery agency cheer as the winner receives payment.
“We would love to have the winner come forward and we can promote the fact that somebody won a million dollars,” Gentry said. “We've put it on the crawl during drawings. We've sent it out to the media. We tell our sales force to tell our retailers. We've been putting it out everywhere and … nothing.”
If the prize is not claimed, it will revert to the lottery's Unclaimed Prize Fund. It uses the forfeited winnings to fund players' prize sweeteners such as Keno “sprinklers,” which appear on random tickets and double or triple their awards.
The biggest contributors to the fund — accounting for about 40 percent of the total — are unclaimed prizes in instant tickets.
Instant tickets cost from $1 to $20 and are so called because players can find out immediately if they won.
Because the prizes can be as small as $1, winners sometimes squirrel the tickets away and forget to cash them in.
But that doesn't explain why a $1 million ticket would be abandoned or lost.
Carnegie Mellon's Loewenstein has a theory.
“This reminds me of a phenomenon called ‘meta-memory,'” the professor said. “When you have something in mind, you overestimate the likelihood that you will remember it in the future. People probably buy the tickets thinking that they will surely check if they've won, then forget to check.”
And $1 million sits in a drawer or on a desk, perhaps in Dundalk, about to become a worthless scrap of paper.
?
