Winning $400,000 lottery ticket expires soon — but no one has claimed the NC prize

A North Carolina lottery player scored a $400,000 prize — but hasn’t come forward to claim it yet.

Now, the winning ticket is about two weeks from expiring, the N.C. Education Lottery said Sept. 19 in a news release.

The jackpot winner’s luck started with a trip to a Food Lion supermarket in Greenville, roughly 85 miles east of Raleigh. While at the Stantonsburg Road store, someone bought a ticket for the 50X The Cash Fast Play jackpot game, officials said.

It turns out, the ticket beat 1-in-320,000 odds to win big. It scored the $478,964 prize on April 6, but now time is running out for the winner to cash in.

“We are encouraging everyone to check all of their tickets to make sure they didn’t overlook this winning ticket,” Mark Michalko, executive director of the N.C. Education Lottery, wrote in the release. “All of us at the lottery have our fingers crossed that whomever bought this Fast Play ticket comes in soon to claim their prize so we can celebrate this amazing win with them.”

In North Carolina, winners have about six months to come forward. The Greenville ticket will expire if the ticket holder doesn’t bring it to the lottery’s Raleigh headquarters before 5 p.m. on Oct. 4, officials said.

If the ticket remains unclaimed, lottery officials told McClatchy News in an email that “half of unclaimed prize money goes to education and the other half is designated to provide prize money to lottery players in other games and lottery promotions.”

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