Jennifer Minton.Photo:Courtesy Virginia Lottery
Courtesy Virginia Lottery
Lady Luck was on one Virginia woman’s side — not once, but twice in October.
Gloucester resident Jennifer Minton won $50,000 playing the Virginia Lottery’sSafari Questonline game in mid-October. Little did she know that one week later, she’d be winning again — but this time the nearly $1 million jackpot,lottery officials said.
Minton told lottery officials that she had been sitting around a campfire, playing the same game on her mobile device, when she noticed the jackpot reset. She said that she recalled thinking in the moment, “Dang, somebody just hit. They are so lucky!”
However, she soon realized that the jackpot of $912,936 was visible on her own screen and that she had indeed been the lucky someone who won it.
“I’m in shock!,” she told lottery officials about the win. “I’m in disbelief!”
Safari Quest is one of the games available via the Virginia Lottery’s app, in which people must match symbols on a 5 x 3 grid. If they receive three bonus symbols, they can activate the bonus wheel where they could win a progressive jackpot.
Ticketing price for the game is between $.20 and $50 to play and the current jackpot following Minton’s win is estimated at just a little over $300,000.
Lottery officials noted that profits from the Virginia Lottery go toward the state’s K-12 public schools. So far, it has raised more than $867 million this fiscal year, with 10% of funding going toward the schools’ budget.
About $2.7 million was raised to fund schools in Minton’s native city, Gloucester, last year.
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In March, an Australian couple wontwo $1 million prizes on separate ticketsin the same lottery drawing after a man purchased two lottery tickets with the same numbers to make up for not buying the tickets the previous week.
The following month, a Cape Cod-based mother and sonwon a $100,000 prizethree times after using the same set of lucky numbers on three lottery tickets.
source: people.com
