Revere Man Accidentally Wins $10 Million

A Revere man’s quick stop at a convenience store to make change for his lunch turned into a life-changing surprise.

Richard Noll bought two $20 scratch tickets at Lanzilli Groceria in East Boston to break a $100 bill. Noll said he just wanted to make change so he could pay for lunch in cash, CBS Boston reports.

Not only did Noll walk away with enough change for his sandwich, but also a $10 million winning ticket.

Noll and his wife opted to receive a one-time payout of $6.5 million after taxes. And he already has big plans for the cash, according to CBS Boston, including buying a house, making some investments and taking his granddaughter to Disney World.

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Noll’s accidental lottery win seems like a one-in-a-million chance, but it actually happens more than you’d think.

In May 2013 a single mother from California accidently bought an extra lottery ticket when she put $5 instead of her usual $4 into a self-service lottery machine. That extra ticket won her $14 million.

An Australian woman had a similar stroke of luck two months later. She reportedly bought a ticket earlier in the week, then forgot about it and bought another. Both tickets were partial winners, earning the woman a total of $835,149.68.

And in 2012 a couple from the UK won twice, each not realizing the other had already bought a ticket. John and Karen Ord won a collective £96,527 (144,983.55 in U.S. dollars) after accidently buying two tickets, using the same set of lucky numbers, on the same day.

>>What would you do with a big lottery win? Tell us in the comments.

But there have also been some not-so-lucky lottery accidents, like the Pennsylvania man who threw away $1.25 million winning tickets in April 2014.

And the woman who unknowingly gave a winning lottery ticket to a homeless man in 2012. She claims she meant to hand a $100 bill to a man asking for help, but was distracted and also handed him a winning $260,000 scratch ticket. In an effort to reclaim her winnings, she offered to split the money if the man came forward.

Luckily for one Canadian couple, their bad luck turned good. Hakeem and Abiola Nosiru lost a $50 million winning ticket in January of 2014, only to have a do-gooder return the ticket months later. According to the woman who returned their ticket, Abiola had dropped it in church.

Image via Shutterstock

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