A lottery player in Bitonto might just be the luckiest man in Italy right now. He accidentally threw his €1m (£857,158) winning slip into the bin, yet a team of refuse workers dug it back out of a mountain of rubbish and handed him his fortune all over again.
The player, who has stayed anonymous, checked his numbers at a shop in Bitonto, in southern Italy. When the machine flashed up that the ticket was "non-payable", he assumed it was worthless and dropped it into the bin at the shop.
One phone call unravels the mix-up
The whole confusion came down to a single message. According to Roberto Nicola Toscano, who heads the local refuse company, the "non-payable" message appears when a prize is simply too large for the shop itself to pay out. The player read it the wrong way and binned the slip as if he had won nothing.
It was only when he got home that his family pointed out the numbers he always plays, 2, 4, 8, 10 and 51, had come up in the draw. "It was then that he realised the misunderstanding," Toscano said. "So they all went to the shop together and discovered that the tickets had been thrown away and collected by one of our operators." Toscano is director of SANB, the firm that handles waste collection across the area.
Racing to stop the bin lorry
As soon as the player contacted the refuse company, staff tracked down the bin lorry that had swept up his ticket. Crucially, its load had not yet been compacted and sent off for disposal. Toscano said it was lucky that it happened to be a Sunday, because otherwise the rubbish would already have ended up in landfill.
The truck was then escorted to a special site, where the hunt began for a tiny piece of paper hidden somewhere in a mountain of waste. It was a needle-in-a-haystack task in every sense.
Found after a two-day hunt
Finally, after two solid days of searching, a waste worker found the winning ticket on Tuesday morning. Toscano called the whole thing nothing short of miraculous. He said the slip was tucked inside a hole-ridden bag alongside other damaged tickets, and was one of the very few that had survived intact.
There is, however, a catch. The cost of the entire recovery operation is to be charged to the winner himself. Before the search even started, he had signed a declaration promising to cover all the expenses that came with digging his ticket back out.
The luck kept on spreading
The good fortune did not stop with the jackpot winner either. As a joke, Toscano and his colleagues bought a scratch card of their own, and it turned up a €50 (£43) prize. So a single slip buried in the rubbish not only restored one man's fortune, it also put a smile on the faces of the people who went looking for it.
