The amount won by the woman is $3237,000, and she went almost a month without checking the ticket. According to the winner, whose name has not been disclosed, she was in the habit of playing Fantasy 5 every day.

Forgetting about Winning the Jackpot

While she admitted to usually checking the numbers every morning, this one time – when it mattered – she seemed to have forgotten. But while visiting a convenience store, she saw that the Fantasy 5 jackpot was reset.

She was “bummed” because the jackpot was just starting to get big, and she was keen to keep trying to win it. Then, she remembered that she hadn’t actually checked her last ticket and went to a lottery machine to scam it.

It was then that the 64-year-old Montmorency County woman realized she had won the March 13 drawing of the game with 19-21-31-32-35. The winner was ecstatic with the news, calling friends and letting them know about what had happened. She went to the Michigan Lottery headquarters to pick the sum but has not revealed her identity.

“Winning the lottery is still sinking in, but now that I am here claiming my prize, it’s starting to feel a lot more real,” the winner admitted.

Unclaimed Jackpots More Often Than You Think

Lottery winnings are unclaimed with an impressive frequency, and while some states have their own rules about how to proceed in such cases, whether they rollback the jackpot into the pool, or collect it for the state, the question remains – why do people miss out on life-changing sums?

The simple question is – do they forget or misplace the tickets? Many people buy tickets in jest and never take them any more seriously than they do the possibility of winning. While the exact number of unclaimed prizes is difficult to pinpoint, there have been some massive prizes that were never sought by a winner.

A person in Georgia failed to turn up and claim $77 million in winnings in 2011. A Florida ticket would have won $50 million in 2013, but it was never collected.  Even before that, a Mega Millions jackpot in New York in 2002 was never claimed.

For a while there, it was thought that a $1.37 billion jackpot in Illinois would never be claimed, but it finally was. Two people won on this occasion and they both turned up to collect.