Did you happen to buy a lottery ticket in a Windsor King Soopers on Aug.1, life got in the way, and you forgot about it? Well, you may be the winner of a $150,000 jackpot that expires if you don’t claim it by 5 p.m. Wednesday.
The Colorado Lottery is searching for the lucky winner of an unclaimed ticket purchased at the 1520 Main St. King Soopers.
“We hate to see that money go wasted,” said Meghan Dougherty, spokeswoman for the Colorado Lottery. “It’s such a big prize.”
If unclaimed, the money isn’t technically wasted, Dougherty said. It would go back to the lottery’s beneficiaries including Great Outdoors Colorado, the Conservation Trust Fund, Colorado Parks and Wildlife and Building Excellent Schools Today.
“But we’re trying to get the word out,” Dougherty said. “We go through every effort possible to find them when the prize is about to expire.”
The winner of the Windsor jackpot needs to make an appointment by calling 800-999-2959 to claim their haul — and their time is ticking down to do so.
Lottery players have 180 days from the drawing of a jackpot game to claim their bounties.
While it’s rare for large jackpots to go unclaimed, Dougherty said Colorado Lottery saw a $1 million Mega Millions win go unclaimed in 2016 and a $2 million Powerball win squandered in 2013.
“That’s just devastating,” Dougherty said. “But we have been able to track people down last minute where they just happen to see something.”
The Colorado Lottery has only seen 16 lottery jackpots — when all of a ticket’s numbers are drawn — go unclaimed in its history, the last time being in 2004.
Thousands of smaller prizes go unclaimed every year, Dougherty said, often because players don’t think to check their ticket if they didn’t take home the big jackpot.
From Jan. 2-22 when Mega Millions was won, the Colorado Lottery sold $33,624,612 in Powerball and Mega Millions tickets — a more than 526% increase from the same time frame last year, according to a Colorado Lottery news release.
Of the thousands of tickets sold, big winners ranged from $10,000 to $1 million.
In January, a $1 million ticket was sold at an Aurora 7-Eleven. A $50,000 ticket was sold at an Aurora Stinker Store. A $10,000 ticket was sold at Bob’s Liquor in Colorado Springs.
“These historic bumps in sales means even more parks, recreation and conservation projects across the state receive critical funding in these times of historic use of the outdoors during the pandemic,” said Tom Seaver, director of the Colorado Lottery.
