Lottery officials "sounding the alarm" on millions in unclaimed prizes
One of the big prizes expires today
By Kate Northrop
The Washington Lottery is putting out a call for players to come forward and collect their prizes after officials tallied over $9.5 million in unclaimed winnings due to expire in the coming months.
More than $9.5 million in Washington Lottery prizes is slated to expire over the course of the next few months if players don't come forward to collect their winnings.
Making up a chunk of that sum are three large prizes totaling over a half-million dollars, which are all expiring within the next two weeks, Lottery officials warned.
Two of these tickets are for $10,000 Match 4 prizes, both nearing reaching their expiration date at the end of April. One of those tickets was purchased at Safeway on 72nd Street East in Tacoma and must be claimed by April 22. The other was sold at Kalispel Market on South Hayford Road in Airway Heights and will expire on April 30.
The biggest of the three is a $617,500 Hit 5 jackpot won by a ticket purchased at Conoco on Basin Street Southwest in Ephrata. The jackpot winner has until May 1 to claim the prize.
That's not the end of it. While there is more time on the clock to claim other prizes, it's still not much. Among the 15 large prizes valued at $10,000 or more, there are three more Hit 5 prizes that have expiration dates in the coming months: a $420,000 jackpot won by a ticket purchased in Ridgefield, which will expire in early June, and a $100,000 jackpot and $115,000 jackpot that will expire in July.
The biggest unclaimed prize in question is an $8.2 million Lotto jackpot won with a ticket sold at a retailer in Bellingham. The winner has until July 30 to validate the winning ticket.
The Lottery is "sounding the alarm" to encourage the winners to come forward, Lottery officials said in an email to Lottery Post, and they're urging players to check their tickets and collect their winnings at a regional office before 5:00 p.m. the day the ticket is set to expire.
Regional Lottery offices are located in Everett, Federal Way, Olympia, Spokane, Tri-Cities, and Vancouver and are open to the public Monday through Friday from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Winners of $100,000 or more should call their nearby Lottery office to schedule and appointment to make a claim.
Lottery players in Washington have 180 days from the draw date to collect draw game prizes, while scratch-off winners have 180 days from the last day of the game's ticket sales to collect their winnings.
Washington state law mandates that money from unclaimed prizes is placed into a reserve account, in which the surplus is transferred to the Washington Opportunity Pathways Account (WOPA) each June. WOPA supports education in the state, including early childhood education, college education, and vocational excellence programs.
That's just fishy. Something has to be wrong with the retail systems in Washington. So sad tho
will the expired winnings REALLY go back to the reserve fund??
* Do l claim the $9.5 million or simply forget about it.. decisions..decisions!
Maybe there is more to the story. Did these players lose their tickets, forgot they played? I know I found old lottery tickets in a purse just in time to check them. Could also be someone got sick or died.
No, there is nothing fishy about the retail system in Washington. Just like every other state, there are millions of dollars worth of unclaimed tickets that expire every year. People buy tickets put them in the glove box in their car, an old shoe box or drawer in their home and forget all about the tickets. I have read countless stories where someone was cleaning out their car one day and found a bunch of lottery tickets in the glove box. They had the tickets checked and found a major winner, days before the ticket would have expired.
A mother asked her 19 year old son to clean up his room, as he was cleaning there was a pile of lottery tickets on the floor under a pile of clothes. He took the tickets to have them checked. One of the tickets was a 100K winner. He said he owed the win to his mother because if she had not asked him to clean his room, the ticket would have expired. He said he was rewarding her with a nice vacation trip to anywhere she wanted to go.
One woman purchased a lottery ticket and put in the pocket of her jeans. She forgot all about ticket in the pocket when she washed the jeans. The drawing was held and she had the winning ticket of $26 million dollars. At that moment she remembered the ticket in the pocket of her jeans. The ticket had been destroyed. She went back to the store where she bought the ticket. She was in the video, as buying the ticket but since she did not have the physical ticket she could not claim the money. Of course the store owner got his money for selling the winning ticket but the woman got nothing.
The expiration deadline is real, and it's worth taking Washington law seriously. It's pretty clear that unclaimed prizes get forfeited 180 days after the drawing, and once that window closes, those funds are redirected to the state's education account. What's interesting about the $9.5M sitting out there is that it likely represents a mix of situations: some folks genuinely lost or misplaced tickets (like Lavender Roses mentioned), but a fair chunk probably comes from casual players who never bothered checking their numbers or forgot they even played. To gregs241's question about the reserve fund, yes, by statute, one-third of unclaimed prizes go directly to the economic development strategic reserve, and any balance over $10M gets transferred to education pathways accounts each June, so it's not just disappearing into thin air.