Lottery winner kept checking ticket — ‘to make sure I was looking at it right’
A lottery player tried her luck on a new game — and it paid off big time.
“I had to read the instructions on the ticket like 10 times just to make sure I was looking at it right,” Natalie Vega told the North Carolina Education Lottery.
It turns out, Vega’s $200,000 prize was the real deal. She hit the jackpot while stopping to get gas in Archdale, a roughly 15-mile drive southwest from Greensboro.
While at a Zingo Express store, she spent $5 on a ticket for the Prize Link Multiplier scratch-off game, lottery officials wrote in a May 22 news release.
“That was my first time buying that ticket,” the lucky winner said. “I like to just pick random ones.”
Vega had won lottery prizes in the past, but she had never scored more than about $20. It took her a moment to soak in the six-figure win.
“It felt so unreal,” she said. “It’s just overwhelming.”
Vega, who lives in Asheboro, kept $143,501 after taxes. Now, she hopes to invest and buy land with the prize money, officials said.
It’s not the first time a lottery player kept looking at their lucky ticket. Another North Carolina winner had trouble grasping how much he’d won, so he checked his ticket over and over, McClatchy News reported May 21.
This story was originally published May 22, 2025 at 11:54 AM with the headline "Lottery winner kept checking ticket — ‘to make sure I was looking at it right’."
