Lottery player who wins big thinks her Missouri ticket is fake. ‘This can’t be real!’

A woman who won a big lottery prize had trouble believing the validity of her prize when she scratched off the ticket in her Missouri home.

“Did someone give me a fake ticket? Am I dreaming?” the Lincoln County woman said in an Oct. 4 Missouri Lottery news release.

It was real — the woman had just won $50,000 playing the $5,000,000 Fortune scratch-off game.

The winner purchased her ticket while stopping at a convenience store in Winfield for a soda and a bag of ice, lottery officials said.

When she scratched it off to reveal matching numbers, she stopped in her tracks.

“I had to stop half-way through to look it over. It took me a long time to finish scratching it,” she said. “I kept thinking, ‘This can’t be real!’”

She called the win “surreal,” telling lottery officials it “couldn’t have come at a better time.”

The $5,000,000 Fortune game costs $50 to play and offers three jackpot prizes. There are also three $1 million prizes and 40 worth $50,000.

Winfield is about a 45-mile drive northwest from St. Louis.

This story was originally published October 7, 2024 at 12:01 PM with the headline "Lottery player who wins big thinks her Missouri ticket is fake. ‘This can’t be real!’."