Store owner told she'll get $1M for selling winning Mega Millions ticket, only she isn't
Editor's note: This story has been modified from its original form.
A store owner who sold one of the two winning Mega Millions lottery tickets for Tuesday's $636 million jackpot was overjoyed when a CNN reporter informed her she'd be getting a $1 million prize for selling the winning ticket.
"Now you know by selling the winning ticket there's also prize money for you," CNN's Martin Savidge told Young Soo Lee, the owner of the Gateway newsstand in Buckhead, Ga., just north of Atlanta.
"I know, but I don't know how much," she replied. "Long time ago, I heard it's $25,000."
"Let me tell you, it's a lot more than $25,000," Savidge replied. "It's about $1 million that you get."
"Really?" she gasped, clutching her chest. "Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh! I never had so much money!"
Only one problem: she won't be getting $1 million. In fact, she won't be getting anything for selling the winning ticket.
While a store owner in California who sold the other winning ticket will be getting a $1 million bonus, Georgia rules aren't so generous. Via NBC News:
Georgia lottery rules provide no retailer payout, spokeswoman Tandi Reddick said. Retailers get a flat 6 percent commission on the sales of the $1 tickets themselves, but no bonus for a winning ticket, she said.
Lee told NBC that she was “a little mad” after learning that she wasn’t getting the bonus.
Lottery officials say the other winning ticket was sold at Jenny's Gift Shop in San Jose, Calif., whose owner, Thuy Nguyen, a 37-year-old Vietnamese man and father of three, bought the store four months ago. Per California rules, Nguyen will receive a $1 million bonus.
Twenty $1 million tickets were also sold, with those tickets matching all of the winning numbers except for the Mega Ball.
The $636 million jackpot was the second largest in U.S. lottery history. The largest, a $656 million prize, was split by three winning tickets in March 2012.
According to Mega Millions, the odds of winning Tuesday's jackpot were 1 in 259 million.
