Two men claim that a million-dollar lottery ticket they purchased in Mahwah, New Jersey is now buried in a Canadian landfill, according to NorthJersey.com.
The men are suing the Lottery Commission in New Jersey to get their money. The men are from Suffern, New York and have been identified as Salvatore Cambria and Erick Onyango.
They claim they threw their Powerball ticket in the trash because they thought it did not win after checking numbers on the website for the lottery. They claim the website had not been updated. The Powerball drawing in question was from March 23, 2013, in which a New Jersey resident won the grand prize.
Cambria claims the ticket had all of the correct numbers except for the Powerball number, which is supposed to pay $1 million.
The two men said they bought three tickets from a Mahwah 7-11, with Onyango keeping the first and third and giving the second to Cambria. Onyango still has his two tickets. Since the three tickets were bought together, the serial numbers are sequential. This is how the men intend to prove they are right in this case.
They were told by the Lottery Commission to submit a claim form with the first and third tickets.
Cambria told NorthJersey.com, “They even told me, ‘You don’t need a lawyer, don’t get one. We know you’re in the right.’ ”
Nothing has happened since then and it has been more than a year since the drawing. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Trenton this week.
Cambria asked Onyango to check the lottery website the night of the drawing, which he did shortly after the drawing, which took place at 11 p.m. The numbers Onyango read were from the previous drawing.
“So I took my ticket, which was worth a million dollars, and I put it in a cigarette pack and put it in the garbage in my bedroom,” Cambria said in his interview with NorthJersey.com.
“I was losing my mind. We were both losing our minds,” Cambria said when they saw the winning numbers the next day.
After speaking with their garbage company, they found out the trash was headed for a landfill in Ontario, Canada.