A Tennessee store clerk is in hot water after authorities say he stole a customer’s winning lottery ticket, threw it away and later fished it out of the trash and tried to claim the winnings as his own.
Meer Patel, 23, was charged with theft over US$250,000, according to the Rutherford Country Sheriff’s Office.
According to a police news release, the real winner bought two winning Diamond and Gold scratch-off tickets worth $20 each at a Murfreesboro, Tenn., gas station. To save time, instead of scratching off the game on the tickets, he only scratched the bar codes and asked Patel to check to see if they were winners.
One of the tickets had a winning prize of $40, which Patel handed over to the winner, police say. But the other ticket, with a whopping $1-million winning prize, he dropped into the garbage can and told the customer it wasn’t a winner.
Store video obtained by investigators at the Tennessee Lottery showed Patel scanning the tickets and dropping one into the trash. However, later on, the footage shows Patel allegedly fishing the ticket out of the garbage and putting it in his pocket.
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“Mr. Patel is then seen later in the video celebrating in the store after scratching off the front of the ticket and learning it was a $1 million winner,” Det. Dennis Ward said in the news release.
The Tennessee Lottery requires any winner of a prize of $200,000 or more to claim their winnings at its Nashville headquarters.
However, employees were suspicious of Patel when he turned up with the winning ticket, police wrote.
“He went to the Tennessee Lottery Commission to claim the ticket as his own and through their normal line of questioning there were enough red flags for them to say, ‘Hey, you need to get all of your affairs in order and come back to us and we’re gonna hold on to the ticket,’” Lt. Det. Steve Craig told local outlet WTVF.
Now, Patel remains in custody while he waits for his hearing later this month.
The good news, however, is that police were able to track down the money’s rightful owner and convince him to claim his winnings.
“The feel-good side of this story is the (man) never knew he was the winner until we made contact with him,” Craig said. “That is absolutely life-changing money.”
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