After a year of hardships, 2020 has taken a pretty rich turn for a young woman in Canada, who decided to play the lottery for the first time.
Unclaimed since 9th October, the lucky winner took home the whopping $70,000,000 jackpot on Friday morning from Loto-Québec’s head office in Montreal.
The newly appointed millionaire was handed the cheque from SARA, Loto-Québec’s robot who’s been handing out prizes since the onset of the pandemic to coincide with sanitary measures and physical distance guidelines.
According to Loto-Québec, the woman bought the ticket “a few weeks before the draw,” after seeing a major lottery prize had been won in Quebec earlier this fall.
She decided to “push her luck” and was “overcome with emotion” after finding out she was the lottery’s big winner. The winner says she took some time to stabilize her emotions before claiming her prize. She plans to take some time to think about how she’ll spend her new winnings.
Loto-Québec President and CEO Lynne Roiter says this is the biggest prize that Lotto Max players can win and the biggest prize of any lottery game offered by Loto-Québec in Canada.
“We’re proud to present a Québec winner, for the second time in our history, with a prize of this magnitude. Last February, a family of eight from the Capitale-Nationale and Chaudière-Appalache regions won the same record jackpot amount,” says Roiter.
As for the robot, SARA was developed and controlled by students from the École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS).
SARA was created to “support innovation in Quebec,” according to Loto-Québec, and was used specifically to comply with the government’s physical distancing guidelines.