Man wins lottery only to accidentally forget ticket at store

‘I was so excited and flustered that I left the ticket inside of the Casey’s store’

Winning the lottery can be an exciting time for anyone, but that doesn’t mean the logistics can be overlooked.

Recently, pastor Kevin Frey from Iowa won $500,000 from a scratch-off ticket and was so lost in the excitement of earning so much money that he ended up leaving his winning ticket inside of the general store where he purchased it.

“I was so excited and flustered that I left the ticket inside of the Casey’s store and went out to the car and started calling everybody,” Frey told the Iowa Lottery officials.

The 64-year-old bought the ticket and ended up claiming the eighth of 14 top prizes in the “$500,000 Ca$h" scratch game. The $50 game features prizes ranging from $50 up to $500,000, with the overall odds of winning of one in 3.09.

As he was contacting all of his friends and family about his luck, Frey received a text from his son asking to send a photo of the winning ticket to prove that he was actually telling the truth.

“My kids know that I tell some pretty good tales sometimes,” Frey said to the Iowa Lottery officials. “So the oldest son who lives down in Des Moines here said that it’s not true until he sees a picture of the ticket. And so we took care of that and he was pretty excited, too.”

That was when he realised he had left the ticket inside the store.

“And then I realised: ‘I don’t have it! It’s in the store!’” Frey said. “Fortunately, I was still in the parking lot of the Casey’s store and I ran back inside and asked the employee for the ticket. She was so flustered, she forgot to give it to me the first time. So, we finally got it on the right page.”

Despite his excitement with winning and letting his loved ones know, Frey was still able to lead his normal church service that Sunday.

“They told me I did a nice job on the sermon, so I said: ‘Well, I guess there was something at work in the middle of all that,’” he said.

As for what the pastor plans on doing with his winnings, Frey and his wife, Marian, plan on moving from New Hampton to the Des Moines area so they can retire and be closer to their family, in addition to other long-term plans and investments.

“This is going to help a lot. This is exciting in that way, too,” he said. “It will be fun to be able to share some of it with some of our family and some of the charities that we support and have supported for a long time.”

In December, several people in Iowa thought they had won the lottery, only for it to be taken away from them hours later due to a “human error” - however, those who cashed in before they were taken down were able to keep the cash.

For around seven hours, some Powerball players thought they had won after the Iowa Lottery posted the wrong winning numbers for the game.

The state’s lottery said that a “human reporting error” caused the winning numbers from the Powerball drawing to state to be displayed incorrectly.