If you were still silently hoping that you’d be the newest Mega Millions jackpot winner, you can give up on that hope now.
The jackpot had gone three months without a winner. This meant it slowly grew larger and larger, grabbing many people’s hopeful attention.
A person in California bought the winning ticket at a Chevron gas station outside of Los Angeles. The total amount for the jackpot was $421 million, which was earned during the Friday night drawing. The winning numbers were 3, 16, 25, 44, 55, and 13.
The winner has yet to be revealed at this time, but they are now the owner of the 13th largest jackpot in Mega Millions history. This individual will have a $298.5 million cash option, which they can take instead of receiving the entire amount in payments over the years.
Technically, the person in California wasn’t the only winner. According to the New York Post, there were four other people who matched all five white balls. This means they got to win $1 million and were exceptionally close to that jackpot. These tickets came from Mississippi, Texas, New York, and Ohio.
That Ohio winner also hit the Megaplier, which means they’ll get an extra $3 million.
You can still fulfill that dream of winning the Mega Millions. The lottery jackpot will start over with a total of $20 million on February 1. The largest Mega Millions jackpot ever was $1.537 billion, which was won in South Carolina on October 23, 2018.
Man Uses Fortune Cookie Numbers on Mega Millions Ticket
Meanwhile, a retired Army sergeant decided to recycle his fortune cookie numbers on a lottery ticket. Talk about good fortune-telling.
Gabriel Fierro from North Carolina used these numbers and ended up $4 million richer. He decided to get food one night with his wife at a local Red Bowl restaurant in Charlotte. “I don’t usually play my fortune cookie numbers but I tried them on a whim,” the 60-year-old said to People.
He bought a $3 ticket through Online Play. He also added the $1 to make it a Megaplier ticket. This is the biggest Online Play winning ticket in North Carolina.
Fierro is a retired Marine sergeant. He spent 32 years of his life in the Army before eventually returning home as a disabled combat veteran. He had certainly earned that good food, as well as the $4 million it led to. After taxes, Fierro earned a lump sum amount of $2,840,401. He wants to invest most of it, but some is going toward creating a proper celebration.
“I got an email in the morning and I just stared at it dumbfounded. I took it and showed it to my wife and she thought it was an April Fool’s joke or maybe a scam … We started running around the house screaming like a bunch of banshees,” he also said to the news outlet.
