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iGamingPublished:Aug 6, 2026, 4:20 PM
A player in Bitonto, near Bari, matched all five MillionDay numbers on July 31 for a $1.15 million (€1 million) prize, then threw the ticket out after misreading the receipt. Public waste company SANB stopped the compactor before it reached landfill and found the slip intact at 5:30 a.m. four days later.
Published: Aug 6, 2026, 4:20 PM
Key Takeaways
- A Bitonto player matched 2, 4, 8, 10 and 51 for $1.15M, then threw the ticket out.
- SANB blocked the compactor and sifted six metric tons of waste at an authorized plant.
- An operator found the ticket intact at 5:30 a.m. on Aug. 4, four days after the draw.
A Two-Word Receipt Message and a Blocked Compactor
The numbers were 2, 4, 8, 10 and 51, drawn at 8:30 p.m. on Friday, July 31. A player in Bitonto, in the province of Bari, had entered them for years because they were tied to someone close, ANSA reported. Roberto Toscano, sole director of public waste company SANB, announced the recovery on social media under the heading “fortuna non olet,” a play on the Latin tag that money does not smell.
The receipt read “non esigibile” – not collectible – which signals only that a prize is too large for the retailer to pay out. The player read it as a losing slip and put it in the dry residual waste.
SANB was told on Sunday, Aug. 2. The company identified the compactor the bag had gone into, blocked the load from reaching landfill, obtained clearances, and moved the waste to an authorized plant on the morning of Aug. 4. Operators sifted it there because SANB’s own facility could not take the load on contamination grounds.
The ticket turned up at 5:30 a.m. “It was in a bag with a hole in it, along with other ruined slips,” Toscano said. “This one was among the few untouched.” He told ANSA the episode had something miraculous about it, describing the player as extremely lucky, then extremely unlucky, then extremely lucky again.
MillionDay, run under Italy’s Lotto concession, draws five numbers from one to 55 twice a day, at 1 p.m. and 8:30 p.m., on a €1 stake with a €1 million top prize. That headline figure is already net: the rules set the five-number payout at 1,086,956.52 times the stake, and Italy’s 8% withholding brings it to exactly a million. It’s one of many recent near-misses, including an Australian couple who learned of a $1.1 million win on Facebook and an Indiana printing error that made a $20-winning ticket look like a $100,000 payout.
Toscano said he touched the ticket on the way past, in case the luck carried. Afterwards the crew went for coffee and bought a scratch card. It paid $58 (€50).
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