A secretive lottery player is one of the luckiest winners ever after striking rich twice in a week.
The 40-year-old man from Bondi, Sydney, Australia, won AUS$1.02 million last weekend when his ticket came up.
He reinvested a small amount in the next week’s lotto – and that ticket won as well.
Second time around the prize was nearly AUS$1.5 million.
That made his winnings in a week a massive AUS$2.4 million.
No one has ever won the jackpot twice in a week in Australia before – although a Canadian man won two houses in six years in a local hospital lottery in Regina.
I’m not going to be stupid with the money
Dubbed Mr Sensible because he plans to invest his cash windfall in property, the winner said:”I’m not going to be stupid with it and I still plan to invest it wisely in real estate but I guess I’m now more financially secure.”
He did confess that he had booked a holiday to Hawaii and bought a new car with some of the money.
Although AUS$2.4 million is a pot not to be sniffed at, it’s nowhere near the record amounts taken home by lotto players around the world.
In the USA, 38 pots of $300 million or more have been won – with the biggest prize of $983 million shared by three lucky winners in January 2016.
The world record for winning a lottery with a single ticket was $758.7 million won in Minnesota in 2016.
Other big lottery wins
The biggest Euromillions jackpot was £161 million, which was won by a British lotto player in July 2012.
The largest fortune handed out in the UK National Lottery was £66 million won in January 2016.
Spain’s Christmas Lottery is generally considered the world’s biggest game. The first prize in 2012 was $941.8 million from a prize pool of $3.29 billion.
But the winning numbers could be sold several times, resulting in each winner picking up an equal share of the pool.
In 2011, the top prize of $853 million was split between 180 tickets numbered 58268.
Meanwhile, lottery winner Brian Morris, 54, had $225,000 of horse manure dumped on his former boss’ property after winning $125 million and quitting his job in Illinois, USA.