Woman says ‘something just told her’ to buy winning £820,000 lottery ticket

A woman who scooped a first-time jackpot on a new lottery scratch card game says some force “just told” her to buy a ticket.

Wendy Hester, from Leland in North Carolina, won won the $1million prize from a $10 VIP Platinum ticket according to the North Carolina Education Lottery.

She hadn’t set out to buy a lottery ticket when she went to her local mini-mart that day, she says, but “something just told me to buy it, so I did”.

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Wendy couldn’t believe her luck at first: “I just kept looking at it thinking ‘This can’t be right',” she said. “But it was right.”

Wendy said she contacted her husband as soon as she realised how lucky she had been.

“I called him and told him ‘I just won a million dollars',” she said.

“This is a dream,” said Hester in a news release from the North Carolina Education Lottery. “We can finally get our home.”

Hester plans to use her windfall to buy the home she has always dreamed of, and possibly use some of the remainder to pay off her car.

“This is a godsend,” she said. “We really needed this.”

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The VIP Platinum game launched this month with five $1million top prizes. Four $1million prizes are yet to be claimed.

The top prize can be paid out in annual instalments but Hester decided to settle for a lump-sum payment of $600,000 (about £495,000), which after tax left her with $427,503 (just over £350,000).

The North Carolina Education Lottery is one of America’s newest, with 100% of its net proceeds go directly to benefit the state's education

The current figure raised since its inception in 2007 is more than $9billion.

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