Canadian couple find lost ticket to become last-minute millionaires

A Quebec couple won Can$1 million ($750,000) in the lottery after finding a winning ticket that had been forgotten in a book for months, the province’s Loto-Quebec organization said Wednesday. Nicole Pedneault and Roger Larocque only realized last weekend that they had a winning ticket from an April 5, 2018 drawing.

While looking through a book about Japan to help her grandson with a school project, Pedneault noticed something had fallen from the pages. It was a lottery ticket the couple had bought for Valentine’s Day last year. “If my grandson hadn’t asked me to give him some things for his presentation, I wouldn’t have ever found the ticket,” Pedneault said.

“The first thing I did when I found the ticket in the book was go look at the deadline for claiming winnings on the Loto-Quebec website,” she said. The ticket was still valid, but not for long -- only until Friday. “It’s all just by chance that we found it at the last minute like that,” the winner said as she claimed her check.