USA Powerball’s 110 Second-Place Winners

110 Powerball players managed to win a combined total of $19.4 million when they all won the 2nd tier prize – Hello Lotto

How do you pick your lottery numbers? Significant dates? Random quick picks? For 110 USA Powerball players who took a chance at winning a $25 million jackpot, a batch of not-so- personalised fortune cookies actually predicted some good fortune for the lucky consumers.When the draw for the Powerball lottery (30 March, 2005) resulted in 110 second-place winners, lottery officials immediately suspected foul play or even a computer glitch. Since the chances of picking five of the six numbers correctly were one in about three million, the occurrence of 110 such cases seemed like

a highly unlikely coincidence (sadly, the tasty treat provided the wrong Powerball, although it wasn’t actually too far off; they needed a 42 instead of 40!). After some detective work, however, officials
managed to uncover the innocent truth and trace it back to a factory called Wonton Food Inc., located in Long Island City. The large distributor explained that every day, four million cookies are cranked out, and thousands of those contain the exact same fortune; in this case, it read:

“All the preparation you've done will finally be paying off.”

22, 28, 32, 33, 39, 40

In order to pay out the prize money caused by ‘Cookiegate’, the lottery had to dip into its reserve fund–$25 million is kept away for unexpected situations—in order to pay out a total of $19.4 million!
The cash was divided up into $100,000 each for 89 winners, and $500,000 each for the remaining 21 winners who were smart enough to play the Power Play option as well. Luck was also on the side of one Tennessee-dwelling player, who scooped up the $25 million jackpot all on his own, walking away with the cash option of $13.5 million.

You just never know when or how the winning numbers will come to you!