The three biggest lottery wins in South Africa

Powerball and Lotto are the most popular forms of gambling in South Africa. As far back as 2007, transaction values for these two games came to R3.972 billion and averaged 5 million transactions per week. Five years later, in 2012 National Lottery sold R4.7 billion worth of tickets for the Lotto and Powerball. This number is sure to have only risen in 2019. There are many exciting lottery winning stories around the world and a good few in South Africa alone. We're going to mention the three biggest South African wins here.

1. The Education guy
 
In February this year, a man in Cape Town won a whooping R232,131,750.69 - the biggest Powerball prize pool in history. The lottery sold over R74m worth of tickets for this draw, but the winner was the only person to select the winning group of numbers. He picked his own numbers - 4, 18, 21, 26, 35, and the Powerball 5. The jackpot at this stage was almost R10m more than the estimated amount.
 
The winner was a man in his fifties, and he waited a full week before claiming his prize. He said that he wished to remain anonymous and to everyone's surprise he added that he would not leave his job. Instead, what he wanted to spend the money on was his children's education.

2. The engineer

A few days before the August 3rd, 2018 draw a man in Mpumalanga spent a mere R20,00 on his lottery tickets. He chose the six winning numbers by himself, only to win a prize of R145,469,799.30. The winner is an engineer and he said that him and his wife have been playing three times a week since university but had never won more than a few hundred rand. They checked the SA lotto winning numbers and were astonished to realize that they were the sole winners of the draw. After claiming their prize, they said that they never struggled financially and the only debt they had was for their car. But the engineer did talk about not being able to find work after he graduated from university and he said that he would never wish that experience on anyone. The couple said that they would be careful about how they spend their money and that they would invest a large portion of it.

3. The security guard

The third biggest win took place in January 2018. The prize pool was R110,000,000. This time there was no one winner but rather the prize was shared between four lucky players. The 4 Winners won R27.5 million each. One of the winners was from Eastern Cape. He was a security guard and a father of five so we weren't surprised to find out that, his first priority was his family as he said "I am very excited, but I am trying to control myself – I don't want this money to change me. I simply plan to send my children to university. "He also added that he wanted to build a house for his family and donate to his church.
 
All these winners seem very responsible with money. But winning such a huge amount can be life-changing. Naledi Masopha, the Public Relations Manager at Ithuba says that "because it is such a significant amount that has been won‚ the person would need to get in touch with us and as soon as they get to the offices of the national lottery‚ they would be offered financial advice and some psychological assistance as well." So, if you are playing the lottery you can rest assured that as a winner you would be in safe hands. However, make sure that you do your part too. Make sure that you check if your ticket won but don't panic if you don't do so immediately. You have up to 365 days to claim the prize!