Winning Lottery Twice: Irish Family Believed To Have Scored Two Lucky Tickets

Luck Of The Irish: Family May Be Double Lotto Winner

Two members of an Irish family may be accidental lottery winners after two winning tickets with identical numbers were sold within half a mile of each other in County Donegal in Ireland.

No one has come forward to claim their winnings from Saturday's Lotto Plus 2 drawing but the newsstand agents who sold the lucky tickets are convinced they must be related. If they are, a lottery official told the Independent the coincidence would be unprecedented. While there are often multiple winning tickets in the Lotto drawing, this is believed to be the first time that two winners have been purchased so close together.

And at a guaranteed €250,000 (or more than $300,000) for each winning ticket, there may be a doubly lucky family waiting to collect.

One €4 ticket was bought at Mac's Mace on High Road in downtown Letterkenny. Another €12 ticket was purchased at The Paper Post on Main Street a mere half a mile away.

"Neither were quick picks so it rules out the possibility that one might have just been a lucky dip. Both people used these numbers on purpose," Paula McEvoy of the National Lottery told the Irish Examiner. "Chances are it could be a husband and wife or a mother and daughter but we can’t say just yet."

Paper Post owner Noel Boyle told the Irish Times that the odds of two strangers in the same town picking identical numbers are unlikely. “We still don’t know who it is but isn’t it great for them?" he said.

The lucky winners have 90 days to claim their money. And, for the record, the winning numbers were 4, 12, 19, 21, 27 and 29.

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