Grandmother wins $100,000

Staff at Fraser Gateway Newsagency (L) Chris McKechnie, Kylie Bromhead and Leonie Ellis where the $100,000 ticket was sold. Kylie sold the grandmother the winning ticket on the weekend.

Alistair Brightman

A HERVEY Bay grandmother who annoyed her family by picking up lost coins off the ground wherever she went has won $100,000 by using the money she found to buy a scratch lottery ticket.

For the past year the Hervey Bay grandmother has been collecting the dropped coins and placing them in a “lucky tin”.

On Saturday she used the $22 worth of coins she’d ferreted away throughout 2010 to buy a lotto ticket and four scratchies at the Fraser Gateway Newsagency in the Centro shopping centre.

Three minutes after buying the scratchies from newsagency assistant Kylie Bromhead she walked back in to check the $100,000 prize.

The woman, who wanted to remain anonymous, said that each year she took her lucky tin to the newsagency to buy lottery tickets.

“I realised last week that I hadn’t yet used the $22 I collected in 2010, so I took my grandson to the newsagency to help me spend it,” she said.

The woman said her grandson scratched the Double Your Luck $2 Instant Scratch-Its ticket and told her she had won $100,000.

“I thought he must be mistaken and told him to check again as I was sure it would have been $1000 rather than $100,000,” the woman said.

“So he checked again and told me he was certain I had won the top prize.

“We were still in the newsagency so I took it straight to the counter to have it validated and sure enough he was right, we had won the top prize of $100,000.”

When asked how she planned to spend the prize money, the woman said she would gift some of it to her children and buy presents for her grandchildren.

“Then I’ll book a cruise and put the rest in the bank,” the woman said.

Ms Bromhead said the woman took the win calmly and just said: “That’s not right that I won $100,000, is it?”

“I checked it, gave her a big cuddle and confirmed that she’d won and then she got excited,” Kylie said.

“She told me she was going to mail the ticket down to the Golden Casket head office and I said: ‘No, take it down yourself, sit in the winners’ lounge and enjoy the champagne.’”