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Mega Millions Lottery Winner Bought Wrong Ticket But Still Won $169 Million Jackpot

By Patricia Grannum
Published on: 07:30 PST, Jul 1, 2016

Mega Millions lottery winner Vito Viola is probably the happiest man in the world right now all because he didn’t listen to his wife.

According to the New York Daily News, the NYPD Sargeant’s wife, Nancy Viola, told him to buy a Powerball lottery ticket back in January since that jackpot was huge at the time.

“Because the jackpot was $900 million,” she said. “It was big. It was all everybody was talking about. He didn’t listen.”

Instead, Vito bought a Quick Pick for the winning Mega Millions lottery numbers — 11, 39, 51, 57, 75, and a Mega Ball 2. But his wife doesn’t mind that he ignored her since the couple is now a whole lot richer.

“That was a good thing,” a beaming Viola said Thursday as she received the oversized check for her Mega Millions jackpot.

Viola says that the day after Vito bought the ticket, she heard that the Mega Millions winner bought the lucky ticket at the same place they did. After checking her lottery ticket, she realized the winning numbers matched hers.

“I started with the Mega ball,” she remembered. “I checked all the other numbers. They all matched, and can you imagine what that was like? I thought I was having a heart attack. There was a little screaming.”

The Staten Island couple have been keeping their win a closely guarded secret since January. In the meantime, they assembled a financial management team and agreed to take a lump sum of their winning, the New York Daily News reports. So, in actuality, they will receive a lump sum of $64,796,160. The money will go directly to a foundation they set up since their win called the Orbity Fund LLC.

So you may be wondering what the couple plans to do with their millions. They told the New York Daily News that they haven’t done any big spending yet, but they said that Vito is already planning on retiring from the NYPD soon.

“We want to let it all sink in,” Nancy Viola said. “Anything is possible. Maybe a convertible. Everything is so new still. It has to just settle in, you know, see what happens. Buy a big house? Maybe in the future. It’s a lot of money.”

Tonight, there’s a new Mega Millions drawing, and players will have the chance to win another big jackpot. As ABC News reports, there have been no Mega Millions lottery winners since March 8, so the prize has gradually increased to $430 million, one of the biggest lottery hauls since the huge Powerball lottery win in January.

Three winning Powerball tickets were sold in Florida, Tennessee, and California, and each winner got a piece of the $1.6 billion prize. It still stands as the largest lottery prize in the world to have ever been won via a single ticket.

Mega millions lottery winning numbers will be drawn at 11 p.m. Eastern time. Just in case you were wondering about your chances, the odds of picking the winning numbers on the white balls and the one yellow ball are one in 259 million.

Mega Millions is available to people living in 44 U.S. states plus the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Fortune Magazine reports that the winner will get $286 million if they opt to get the one-time cash payment instead of an initial payment followed by monthly payments.

According to Fortune, the $415 million jackpot is the 10th largest in U.S. history based on figures provided by lottery officials. As we mentioned before, the last winning Mega Millions jackpot was sold in March and earned the winner $157 million.

[Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images]

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