$650,000 Winning Lottery Ticket Sold To Holiday Shopper In Niles

NILES, IL — One lucky holiday shopper should have no problem affording gifts for family and friends this year after winning a jackpot prize from the Illinois Lottery.

The buyer of a ticket at the Golf Mill Shopping Center managed to correctly guess all five numbers in the Friday evening Lucky Day Lotto drawing.

While more than 21,000 tickets sold for the drawing wound up winning something, the Niles lottery ticket purchaser is due to walk away with the grand prize: $650,000.

The Golf Mill Shopping Center retailer who sold the ticket will also receive a bonus of $6,500 — 10 percent of the total prize amount.

Winners have one year from the winning draw to claim their ticket, according to lottery representatives, who encouraged anyone with a winning ticket to write their names on the back of it and keep it in a safe place until it is time to claim it.

The Lucky Day Lotto drawing takes place twice every day. So far in 2023, the game has paid out more than $66 million to more than 11 million winners — coming out to average winnings of about $6.

Illinois became the first state to privatize its lottery operations in 2011. This year, lottery operator Camelot — which has fallen hundreds of millions of dollars short of the revenue generated by smaller states' lotteries, according to former Lottery Control Board Chairman Gary Fencik.

This year, Camelot was purchased by Switzerland-based Allwyn, which operates Austria, lotteries in the Czech Republic, Greece and Cyprus and Italy.