An unknown player won the fifth biggest prize of all time in Mega Millions, the US lottery, this Friday. That’s $1.22 million if you get it in 30 years — or less than $600,000 if you want the entire prize now. What would you do if it left you?
Once again overcoming “impossible” odds, someone bought a lottery ticket at a gas station in California and won a prize estimated at $1.22 billion (about 1.17 billion euros) in this Friday’s Mega Millions draw, the North American lottery.
According to , the winning ticket was sold at Sunshine Food and Gasin Cottonwood, according to the California State Lottery. The winning numbers were 3, 7, 37, 49 and 55, and the golden Mega Ball was 6.
A identity of the ticket buyer was not immediately made public; jackpot winners have up to a year to claim their prize. But lottery officials in California, a state where winners’ names are in the public domain, are expected to soon announce the lucky winner.
According to Mega Millions rules, the winner can now choose to receive the full jackpot amount in 30 years, in annual payments (about 40 million per year), or an immediate one-off payment of around 549.7 million of dollars in cash — less than half the total prize.
The jackpot was fifth biggest Mega Millions prizethe lottery organization said in a statement. And the ninth biggest lottery jackpot of the history of the United States, recalls the .
A last time a Mega Millions bettor won the jackpot It was in September, when the prize was US$810 million.
The ticket that won the biggest Mega Millions jackpot ever, worth $1.58 billion, was sold in Florida in August 2023.
There have already been three major jackpots, all won in Powerball drawings — the North American “Euromillions”. In November 2022, a bettor won a prize in the USA.
Those in the Mega Millions and Powerball lottery drawings due to changes introduced to the games over the years and higher ticket prices.
More than 10 jackpots in the country have exceeded $1 billion since 2016, including three this year, but the Mega Millions jackpot has been won just four times in 2024, the fewest times in a single year in the game’s 22-year history.
In Portugal, numbers are more modest: the biggest EuroMillions prize of all time in our country was . It came out in June this year to a bettor from Ramalde, in Porto, who made the simplest bet possible: just 2.5 euros.
