By IANS/EFE,
Santiago : A Chilean taxi driver became a millionaire after finding that a lottery ticket he had forgotten after keeping in the glove compartment of his vehicle for several weeks had won a prize worth 934 million pesos ($1.76 million).
The daily La Tercera reported Tuesday that the winner was Daniel Maldonado, a taxi driver who Dec 31 bought a ticket for the lottery and another for Kino, a game of chance whose prize continues to increase if no winners are forthcoming in succeeding draws.
The surprise occurred in the southern town of Coronel, 545 km from capital Santiago.
The game consists of the winning ticket having all 15 numbers that are drawn in that edition of the game.
Maldonado put the tickets in the glove compartment and forgot about them until two days ago, when he lent the taxi to his father-in-law who had an accident, so it had to be sent for repairs.
Before taking the taxi to the garage, Maldonado took everything out of the glove compartment and found the tickets.
He went to a lottery agency Friday and asked the person in charge to check them. As a joke he said, “Check them and pay me, because I’m the winner”.
“When I showed him the prize on the screen he was totally silent. He broke out in a cold sweat,” the manager of the agency, Enrique Lepe, told the daily.
The draw of the winning ticket took place Jan 3, and the 32-year-old Maldonado kept it for six weeks, to the point that Chile’s legal 60-day limit for collecting prizes for games of chance was almost up.
“I’m going to take very good care of the money, I won’t do anything crazy. First, practically all of it is going in the bank, but we will go on vacation in the area with the family…which we hadn’t planned on,” the new millionaire said.
Kino manager Fernando Silva said: “He has been going around since the beginning of the year with (almost) a billion (pesos) and didn’t know it.”