A woman who accidentally received the wrong lottery ticket from a cashier and decided to buy it anyway made the right move.
Oksana Zaharov, 46, from Edgewater, New Jersey, was shopping in Manhattan when she asked a clerk for a $1 New York Lottery scratch-off ticket. Instead, the man unwittingly handed her a $10 Set For Life ticket.
Zaharov noticed the mistake. “When the clerk handed me the wrong ticket I felt bad, so I decided to just go ahead and buy it,” the mother of two told the lottery in a press release. “I actually used the ticket as a bookmark for a couple weeks before I decided to scratch it.”
Now she can buy a whole lot of bookmarks. Zaharov won $5 million to be distributed over 20 years, plus annual net sums of $172,068 after that for the rest of her life.
“I never win anything,” she told the lottery. “I was sure the ticket was fake. It wasn’t until I brought it into the office that I knew it was for real.”
Zaharov hopes to take her family on a Bahamas vacation and plans to fund her children’s college education.
HuffPost reached out to her ― and we swear it wasn’t for a loan but rather to see if she wants to comment on her win.