SC woman turns $100 winning lottery ticket into a much, much bigger grand prize

A Midlands woman turned a nice lottery prize into a much larger jackpot.

The woman won $100 on a scratch-off ticket, but didn’t stop there, South Carolina Education Lottery officials said in a news release.

She spent $20 of her winnings on two lottery tickets, won her money back and then bought two more tickets that caught her eye, according to the release.

The $300,000 grand prize from one of those $10 scratch-off games that she bought at a convenience store in Lexington County definitely caught her eye, lottery officials said.

“I went out to my car to scratch them,” she said in the release. “And I was surprised.”

A few minutes later she ran back inside the Pantry store on Columbia Avenue in Batesburg to check a Max Money scratch-off game with the store’s ticket checker, officials said. When the clerk asked how much she won, she told him, “You can’t pay me,” according to the release.

The store is less than a mile from Shealy’s Bar-B-Que restaurant, where $300,000 could buy a lot of buffet meals.

The woman didn’t say how she plans to spend her newfound windfall, saying only she’s saving most of the $300,000 win for retirement, according to the release.

The winner will be allowed to retain some privacy, as South Carolina is one of 11 states — along with Arizona, Delaware, Georgia, Kansas, Maryland, New Jersey, North Dakota, Ohio, Texas and Virginia — that allow lottery winners to remain anonymous.

The odds of winning the $300,000 top prize in the Max Money game were 1-in-936,000, according to the release. The woman won the game’s last top prize-winning ticket and Max Money is no longer available, officials said.

The Pantry store received a commission of $3,000 for selling the claimed ticket, according to the release.