TORONTO $60 MILLION LOTTO MAX WINNER HID HIS WINNING TICKET UNDER A CARPET  

A lottery winner from Toronto who took home a $60 million Lotto Max jackpot said that he hid the ticket under a carpet before claiming his prize. Maurice De Gennaro, 68, said that he was so overcome with shock and emotion, he thought that under a carpet would be the safest place to keep it. The engineer said that he checked his ticket against the Lotto Max numbers on his phone on the Saturday morning after the draw, when he got home from running his usual weekend errands.

Months after another Toronto lottery winner took home $24.5 million, the most recent winner said “I saw every single number match up and said out loud, ‘I’ve made a mistake. There is no way I won.’” But then he went to his computer, and double checked the numbers, realising that he had in actual fact scored the entire Lotto Max jackpot. “I started shaking, broke out in a sweat and thought, ‘this is all too much.’ And that’s when I tucked the ticket under the carpet,” he told lottery officials. However, after that when the Lotto Max winner was at work, he suddenly wondered what would happen to the ticket if there was a flood in the house. 

“I realised that wasn’t sensible, so instead I stuck it under a lamp,” he said, and this wasn’t even the strangest place that a lottery ticket has been hidden, as a recent New Zealand Lotto winner kept their ticket in an empty cake tin, and a UK scratch card winner hid his winning lottery ticket in all sorts of places before he chose the safest option. Instead of waiting until the deadline like another Toronto Lotto Max winner did, and giving himself a few days to come to terms with his win, Mr De Gennaro didn’t reveal his fortune until he was having an Easter dinner with his sister and nephew. “I pulled out a photocopy of my ticket and said ‘it appears that I won a substantial amount of money,’” at which his sister couldn’t believe what she was hearing, and his nephew had to check and recheck the Lotto Max ticket several times.

“Then, believe it or not, we just went ahead with our Easter celebration, like nothing had happened,” said the winner. Thanks to his winnings, the first thing that Mr De Gennaro plans to do is pick up where he left off after a vacation in France that was cut short. “A vacation in Europe two years ago suddenly ended when I broke my arm and leg,” he explained, adding that he’ll head to France first, and then take his time travelling around the rest of the continent. 

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