UPDATE II: The ticket has now been claimed, Lotteries Commission spokeswoman Karen Jones told NBR. The Commission will not disclose any details about the winner, including their location. The person has yet to front with the ticket, but has given the Comm
UPDATE II: The ticket has now been claimed, Lotteries Commission spokeswoman Karen Jones told NBR. The Commission will not disclose any details about the winner, including their location. The person has yet to front with the ticket, but has given the Commission enough information to convince it they're kosher,
UPDATE I: Monday afternoon, the winner still hadn't come forward. Lotteries' Commission spokeswoman Karen Jones told NBR she wasn't surprised.
It sometimes took a big winner one or two days to come forward, said Ms Jones, who guesses the new multimillionaire might have gone into work as usual today. "Otherwise, if you're in Papakura, it might be quite obvious".
Let's hope it wasn't in a pocket in a pair of your trousers that went through the wash.
The winning ticket from Saturday's Lotto draw - a $28.7 million Powerball winner - remains unclaimed.
The ticket was bought at a service station in Papakura, on Auckland's southern fringe.
A spokeswoman for the Lotteries Commission said it was unusual for a ticket to remain unclaimed by Monday morning.
Astonishingly, Saturday's absent winner in good company: more than $50 million in Lotto prize money has been left unclaimed over the past five years.
Unclaimed prizes are put pack into the prize pool after 12 months.
More than 1.7 million tickets were sold for Saturday's draw, or more than twice the usual number, the commission told Radio New Zealand.
When a person checks their ticket at a Lotto outlet, the commission is automatically notified, electronically, if they are a major winner - although the only way the winner can claim the cash is to visit the agency in Wellington.
If a ticket has been lost or destroyed, it can still be possible to claim a prize. For example, though security camera footage being matched to an Eftpos record.
Saturday's win was the largest in Lotto history behind a Big Wednesday ticket that earned a Masterton syndicate $36 million last year.
