Garbage Collectors 'Miraculously' Recover Lottery Ticket

A woman in Italy won a million-dollar lottery, only to realize that she had thrown out her winning ticket in the trash. Incredibly, garbage collectors then found the ticket after combing through mounds of trash for hours, reports AFP. It was "miraculously still in one piece," says Roberto Nicola Toscano, administrator of the SANB sanitation company in Italy's Puglia region. The ticket was worth 1 million euro, or about $1.2 million.

Officials in Puglia say it all began when an anonymous woman tossed her instant-win ticket after a shop machine flagged it as "non-payable," not realizing smaller retailers can't process big prizes. Once a family member spotted that her usual numbers had actually hit, she called her trash hauler, SANB. Toscano traced the ticket's route, stopped the truck, and had it searched at a specialized facility. "I would have hugged her, but we were on the phone," he says. The woman will reimburse the public agency for the cost of the search, though it wasn't clear if the sanitation workers were in line for a reward, too.