A $175,000 lottery ticket or a $25 gift card for TJ Maxx? I certainly know which one I’d choose.

No offence TJ Maxx obviously… But there’s not really any competition.

However, one woman didn’t technically knowingly choose one over the other after entering into a game in the office known as dirty Santa or Yankee swap.

The game sees a group of people take part in a secret Santa-style gift purchasing, but instead of buying an item for a name drawn from a hat, you put all the items in the middle of circle and perform a lucky dip.

To spice things up a bit, as you go round the circle, you can decide whether you want to pick up a parcel or if you want to ‘steal’ the present the person before you has just unwrapped. And one woman’s decision to ‘steal’ another employee’s gift turned out decidedly well.

Office manager Lori Janes from Kentucky, US, was playing the game with the rest of her colleagues from Harmon Dental Centre at their Christmas party in 2022 when she picked up a $25 TJ Maxx voucher and was pretty delighted.

Alas, the next person along from her decided to ‘steal’ it, with Janes left ‘pretty disappointed’.

Thankfully, being the first person to pick up, the game states when everyone has taken their turn, the first player then has the chance to swap their gift for any other player’s present.

So, when it came back to her, Janes decided to steal $25 worth of lottery tickets.

Prepare to feel pretty hard done by if all you got in your work secret Santa was a bauble or some chocolate.

One very lucky woman in Kentucky won $175,000 from scratch cards she won playing white elephant (Kentucky Lottery)

As soon as the game came to an end, Janes’ team urged her to scratch off her lotto tickets right away.

The first ticket won Janes $50, which was already a pretty good profit – but when she got to the Hit The Jackpot ticket, she was blown away.

The $10 was a winner, meaning she had landed the game’s top prize of a whopping $175,000.

Lori at first was disappointed to lose her TJ Maxx voucher… but not for long! (Kentucky Lottery)

“Everyone was going insane. People were getting their calculators out and double-checking. A couple of people even scanned the ticket on the lottery’s app, just to make sure,” she recalled to the Kentucky Lottery.

“I couldn’t believe it. It was a $25 gift exchange, and I won $175,000!”

When Janes called her family to tell them the good news, they almost didn’t believe her since she never played the lottery.

“We figured she didn’t look at it right, but then we heard people in the background celebrating, it became real,” her husband told Kentucky lottery officials.

To make sure it was real, Janes’ husband and kids came with her to the lottery headquarters to hand in the ticket and walked out with a check for $124,250 after taxes.

After winning, Janes revealed her plans to pay off her daughter’s student loans and their car loans.

And I’m sure she was able to spend at least a little of whatever was left on a trip to TJ Maxx.

Someone who won a Mega Millions jackpot has revealed that winning the huge amount of money isn’t as good as you’d expect.

Okay, I’m sure many of us would agree that our lives would be substantially better if we had a vast amount of money in our bank accounts, but is all that comes with being rich a good thing?

Well, this person’s experience seems to have been both good and bad.

Taking to Reddit yesterday (September 9), an anonymous poster opened the floor for people to ask questions about what it’s like winning a Mega Millions jackpot.

They wrote: “In 2016, I won the MegaMillions jackpot and took home, after taxes, mid-eight figures. Ask me anything!!!”

Like many of us would do if we all of a sudden became drastically richer, this jackpot winner offered to financially help out their family – but things quickly turned sour.

Discussing some of the lifestyle changes they’ve faced post-win, the Redditor shared: “After I won, I met with my parents and siblings. I told them what had happened and made the offer to set each of them up with a new house and to establish trusts for each of my nieces and nephews to attend university.

“They filed a lawsuit to try to place me in conservatorship to take control of my asset.”

The Redditor says they won the Mega Millions jackpot in 2016 (Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

A judge ‘laughed them out of the courtroom’, however, and the person has since cut all ties with their family.

Asking what their relationship was like with their family before they won an eight-figure sum, the winner replied: “My family was always toxic and the relationship was always strained. I expected them to not be satisfied with the offer I made to them, but I didn’t expect a legal knife in the back.”

While falling out with your family is never an easy situation, this person said that their mental health has ‘improved exponentially’ since becoming estranged from them.

They discussed the matter on Reddit and let others ask them questions (Idrees Abbas/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

And it wasn’t just their family that tried to sponge off them, their friends did so too.

“I also approached a group of friends with a proposal to start a logistics consulting firm,” they explained. “I offered my friends six-figure salaries, profit sharing and bonuses. They said no, but asked me for the cash instead.”

Now the Redditor has changed their name and hasn’t spoken to any of their family and friends since.

The jackpot winner went on to issue a stark warning in light of their own experiences.

They said: “The safest thing to do is to assume that everyone you tell is going to try to take your money from you.”

A man was left disappointed after buying what seemed to be a winning Powerball ticket, only to be told it was not valid.

Had he been able to claim it, the lottery ticket would have been worth a life-changing $340 million, but the company is claiming that there was a ‘mistake’.

John Cheeks, from Washington DC, bought the Powerball ticket on January 6, 2023.

He was thrilled when the numbers on the ticket matched up with those displayed on the website, meaning the ticket could have won him the $340 million jackpot.

Cheeks missed the live drawing on January 7, and wasn’t in any rush to check the numbers given the extremely long odds of winning at the Powerball – around one in 292.2 million.

He claims that he checked the numbers on the DC Lottery’s website the day after, and was shocked to find that he appeared to have become the year’s first multimillionaire.

The numbers were up on the website for some three days according to a complaint that he is making.

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Cheeks is now suing Powerball and DC Lottery after being told that his ticket was not valid, despite the numbers matching up.

Recalling his reaction to thinking he had won, he told NBC4: “I just politely called a friend. I took a picture as he recommended, and that was it. I went to sleep.”

The problem was that the numbers which were displayed on the website were not the same as the ones which were pulled up live on the programme.

When Cheeks went to the DC Office of Lottery and Gaming prize center to check, he was told the ticket was not valid.

Recounting the incident, he said: “’Hey, this ticket is no good. Just throw it in the trash can.

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“And I gave him a stern look. I said, ‘In the trash can?’ ‘Oh yeah, just throw it away. You’re not gonna get paid. There’s a trash can right there.’”

But Cheeks has not put the ticket in the trash, instead placing it in a safety deposit box.

The lawsuit filed by his attorney, Richard Evans, claims that Cheeks was eventually told that contractor Taoti Enterprises made a ‘mistake’ and accidentally posted the wrong numbers on the website.

Evans told NBC 4: “They have said that one of their contractors made a mistake. I haven’t seen the evidence to support that yet.”

Although Cheeks’ numbers do not match to the live draw, Evans argues that due to the mistake something still needs to be done, saying: “Even if a mistake was made, the question becomes: What do you do about that?”

UNILAD has contacted Powerball, the Multi-State Lottery Association and Taoti Enterprises for comment.

You’d think that winning the lottery would be a once-in-a-lifetime kinda event, but one woman has managed to win the jackpot twice in just three months.

Christine Wilson, from Attleboro in Massachusetts, has managed to scoop a $1 million prize twice within the space of 10 weeks.

Christine’s first win came when she played the ‘Lifetime Millions’ game in February, where she won $1 million from just $50.

According to the Massachusetts Lottery site, that particular game has winning odds of 1 in 8,400,000.

Meanwhile, Christine’s most recent win came from a $10 game called ‘100X Cash’ – which has winning odds of 1 in 1,612,800.

On both wins, Christine decided to receive her prize as a one-time payment of $650,000.

While Christine bought her first ticket at Dubs’ Discount Liquors in Mansfield, her second win came from the Family Food Mart in the same town.

The shop will receive a $10,000 bonus for selling the ticket.

Christine won the lottery twice. (Massachusetts State Lottery)

Recently, a Harvard professor revealed the best ways to increase your chances of winning a large sum of money on the lottery.

Many players employ tactics they think will help them win big, while others just accept that the lottery is just purely luck.

However, Harvard statistics professor Dr. Mark Glickman previously told CNBC Make It that there is one proven way of boosting your chances of winning.

It’s pretty obvious, but the only way of upping your chances is buying more tickets.

That’s simply because the odds remain the same if you buy just one ticket for a game, no matter what numbers you decide on.

And although it might seem crazy that Christine won twice, if someone already wins the lottery, the chances of them winning again is exactly the same.

The odds of winning twice are the same as winning once. (Douglas Sacha/Getty Images)

“If someone already wins the lottery, then the chance that the person wins the lottery a second time will be exactly the same as the probability they win the lottery if they had not previously won the lottery before,” Glickman told CNBC‘s Make It.

“In other words, having previously won the lottery does not improve or make less likely the chance of winning the lottery in the future.”

As all the lotteries are independent, it does not matter if you buy a ticket every day or every month, your odds going into each draw are the exact same as everyone else.

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