Good deed pays off big: person returns lost $100 bill, wins $1 million lottery jackpot minutes later

We often ask ourselves what we would do in any number of given situations, like ‘what would you do if you found money without an owner?’ Well, an individual in New Jersey was put to that test recently when they went to buy a lottery ticket.

The person passed the “test from God,” as they called it, “with flying colors” when they refused to claim an ownerless $100 bill for themselves. Shortly thereafter, the individual received a windfall of $1 million.

Good deed pays off big

The New Jersey Lottery explained in a press release that on April 30, the person, who hasn’t been identified, walked into the Phillipsburg Paul Mart in Warren County planning to play a Scratch-Off game. However, upon reaching the counter, the individual noticed a $100 bill just sitting on top with no one there to claim it.

“I see it, and I turn around. There’s a person at the ATM and two people waiting in line,” the individual recalled. The person then asked them, “Did somebody leave this here?”

Nobody answered, so they asked the clerk for an envelop to put the bill in and place it in the store’s lost and found. “Everybody there just looked at me like I was nuts,” the person recalled adding: “Everybody’s saying, ‘just keep it.’”

But that just didn’t sit well with the individual. “I feel that if you take something that’s not yours, you will never get your own,” they explained.

The clerk obliged the request and then sold the person three $20 Power 20X tickets, “along with a healthy dose of good karma,” said lottery officials. After scratching off the tickets, and the individual scanned them and realized “something special was afoot.”

“I thought the ticket wasn’t activated,” the person explained. However, the clerk told the individual that they had “the golden ticket.” The player had won the third highest prize in the game, $1 million, on one of the tickets.

“I started crying and shaking,” the person recounted to lottery officials. “I thought if I had taken that $100 bill, I would have felt guilty and I would have left there and never bought the ticket. I just truly believe it was a test from God.”

The person shared with lottery officials that they plan to use the windfall “to buy a modest house and a reliable car—something that had been unobtainable before.”

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