Russell Clarke and Sheila Gray are $100,000 richer.
Clarke was at the Safeway gas bar in Fort Saskatchewan in mid-June when he remembered to check a lottery ticket he purchased a couple of months ago.
Turns out, the ticket matched the last six digits of a previous Lotto Max winning draw.
“I honestly thought the scanner was broken; all I saw was zeroes but I didn’t realize,” he said while claiming his prize. “I checked a non-winning ticket just to confirm. Then the machine went off and froze up the terminal.”
Clarke says it was a total shock for the Sturgeon County couple.
“I went home to show my wife and she was looking at a weather app, so I passed her the claim slip and she kept trying to get me to look at the weather,” he laughed. “I said, ‘Look at what you’re holding!’”
When Gray saw the claim slip, she was in disbelief.
“I asked if he was joking and when he wasn’t I just kept saying ‘oh my God!’”
The happy winners have started thinking about all the ways they can use their newfound windfall.
“As much as we’d like to blow it, we’re going to put some towards our mortgage,” Gray added. “We may take a trip to the east coast.”