SPRINGFIELD ——
Last St. Patrick's Day, four $1 million lottery tickets were drawn in Illinois, but so far only three of the buyers have claimed their pots o' gold.
The luck of the Irish will run out March 17, the anniversary of the sale, if nobody turns in the fourth ticket that was bought at a gas station in west suburban Wood Dale.
It's far from unusual that somebody buys a winning ticket and fails to collect. Illinois amasses tens of millions of dollars in unclaimed lottery prizes each year. But winners usually cash in early rather than risk misplacing the ticket before the anniversary — and losing their windfall along with it.
Jim Batson, owner of the Marathon station on Irving Park Road where the unclaimed ticket was sold, hopes the buyer will claim the Millionaire Raffle prize before it's too late.
"We tell everybody who comes in to check between their couches and anywhere else," Batson said. "Sure feels like someone lost it."
Lottery agents have even put up a flier alerting customers to the prize and deadline.
The Millionaire Raffle is exactly what it sounds like, with 500,000 individually numbered tickets sold at $20 a pop. A computerized drawing spits out four winning tickets, each worth $1 million. The odds of capturing the top prize are 1 in 125,000.
After the drawing last year, winning tickets were turned in from convenience stores in Pocahontas, near St. Louis, and Robinson, in southern Illinois near the Indiana border. In an odd coincidence, the other winning ticket was bought less than four miles from Batson's store, at another Marathon station on Busse Road in Elk Grove Village.
The Millionaire Raffle prize is not even the largest one unclaimed and still valid. Someone bought a $6.5 million Lotto ticket at a Road Ranger truck stop in Roscoe, near the Wisconsin border, in August, but no one has turned in the winning ticket. The largest unclaimed prize in Illinois history was a $14 million Lotto ticket sold in Frankfort in January 2004. No one ever collected.
The state sold nearly $2.7 billion worth of tickets in the budget year that ended June 30, but unclaimed totals for that period are still being tallied. The previous year, the unclaimed prize winnings hit $32.4 million. The vast majority of that unclaimed cash goes into the common school fund, according to the lottery.
Most states have a similar approach with unclaimed prizes, said David Gale, executive director of the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries. But some states throw unclaimed winnings back into future jackpots, and others use the money for different funds, such as helping to support programs to battle gambling addictions.
There's still a chance someone will turn in that outstanding ticket from Wood Dale as time ticks down to the expiration date. In 2011, for example, a South Side man claimed a $9 million Lotto prize just days before the winning ticket expired.
"Most people don't typically wait the full year," said Mike Lang, lottery spokesman. "But once in a while, we do get one."
Batson holds out hope for his patrons. "It would be nice if one of my regulars had won it," he said.
Whether or not the prize is claimed, Batson already has collected a lucky reward. He received the standard 1 percent commission for selling a winning ticket — a payday worth $10,000.
raguerrero2@tribune.com
Twitter @ChiTribCloutSt
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