Lottery player who binned winning £860k ticket FINDS it after searching through stinking rubbish at tip for two days

NewsWorld News A LOTTERY player has found her missing £857,158 winning ticket after a trawling through mountains of rubbish for two days. The unnamed woman threw away her ticket after she was told by a small shop in Bitonto, a town in Southern Italy, that it was “non-payable”. She assumed the ticket was a dug and dumped it in the bin – but the error message actually meant the sum of money was too large for the shop to pay out. The realisation that she was sitting on a huge winner came when a relative told her that her favourite numbers – 2, 4, 8, 10, and 51 – had been drawn, and she had won £857,158. Sign up for The Sun newsletter Thank you! She hurried back to the store only to be told that the binmen had come to collect the rubbish along with her golden ticket. The woman pleaded with the local rubbish collection company to help her recover it, launching a major search-and-rescue operation to recover her jackpot. Roberto Nicola Toscano, the administrator of the SANB company who is tasked with waste collection in the Puglia region, helped in the search. He said: “This story is nothing short of miraculous.” Roberto Nicola Toscano, an administrator of SANB company, helped the distressed lottery winner find her missing golden ticket Credit: Facebook They managed to track down the disposal truck before it dumped the waste into a compactor and stopped it. Toscano said: “Lucky it was a Sunday, otherwise the load would have already ended up in landfill.” Most read in The Sun But the search was not all smooth-sailing. The search was at risk due to potentially dangerously hazardous material lurking in the rubbish, so the truck had to be taken to a specialist site. He said: “We contacted a company in the Bari area that could enable us to sort through the load, and we started searching in the morning.” After two days of wafting in the pungent smell, a worker found the “small piece of paper hidden in a mountain of waste.” It was discovered in a “hole-ridden” bag strewn with other damaged tickets stubs from past unlucky players. Toscano won £42 on a scratch card after helping the jackpot winner trawl through a ‘mountain of rubbish’ Credit: Facebook Toscano rang the woman to deliver the good news. He said: “She cried with emotion. I would have hugged her, but we were on the phone. He told Italian news that he touched the ticket before returning it to the twice-lucky winner, that it might in turn bring him good fortune. And, with a stroke of luck, he won £42 shortly afterwards when buying a scratch card. Comment now