Winning Match 4 ticket unclaimed; is it yours?

Published 11:28 pm Saturday, February 21, 2009

MONROE — You may be $10,000 richer this moment and not even know it.

That’s the value of a winning — and still unclaimed — Match 4 ticket sold Jan. 20 at the Extra Mile Chevron in Monroe on U.S. 2.

No one knows whether the ticket holder is a man or a woman, a local resident or someone passing through town who stopped for gas and made the purchase.

On Friday, it was one of 17 unclaimed Match 4 prizes worth $10,000 each, the maximum payout in the game. There’s also a $1 million jackpot waiting to be picked up; that ticket was sold Feb. 11 in Olympia.

Overall, most people collect quickly after winning big in the lottery.

“Most large prizes are claimed because people are watching tickets closely on larger jackpots,” said Jacque Coe, communications director for the Washington State Lottery.

Still, some jackpots go unclaimed. The state doesn’t track the number and amounts of uncollected prizes but Coe recalled the largest unclaimed pot ever was $6 million. That was in 1993.

To prevent such instances, the state lottery puts out a lot of publicity when big jackpots are hit and then again if the deadline to collect is about to run out, she said.

Players must claim their winnings within 180 days from the date of a drawing. If they don’t, two-thirds of the cash is returned to the pool of prize money and the rest put into an account used to promote economic development in the state.

For the possessor of the Monroe ticket, there’s five months left as it expires July 19.

Unless they come to the store, manager Terry Eaton said he may never know who it is.

Scratch game players tend to pick up their small winnings immediately from the store, he said. The bigger winnings have to be claimed by going to lottery officials.

“If they get a $10,000 winner, we may not even know about it,” he said, adding the winning ticket was one of 79 tickets purchased that day for various Washington Lottery games.

OK, at this point, stop reading and check your ticket. Do you have these numbers: 9, 12, 15 and 16.

If you think you won, information on unclaimed prizes is posted on the state lottery’s Web site at www.walottery.com.

Until 2005, money from all expired winning tickets went back into the games.

That year the Legislature created the Economic Development Strategic Reserve Account and placed it under the control of the governor’s office.

The account contains $6 million from unclaimed prizes now and is projected to grow to $6.5 million in the next two-year budget, said Glenn Kuper, communications director of the Office of Financial Management.

The money primarily is used for recruiting, retaining and assisting businesses, although Gov. Chris Gregoire can steer some of the revenues into the state’s general fund, he said. There are no plans to do so, he said.

Lottery officials want to keep those winnings out of the system.

“People collecting prizes in the lottery will always generate more revenue than a prize unclaimed,” Coe said.

That’s why if July rolls around and the Monroe winner is still a mystery, they’ll step up their efforts to find them.

“Someone is walking around Monroe with a little two-inch slip of paper worth $10,000,” Coe said.

Jerry Cornfield, 360-352-8623, jcornfield@heraldnet.com.