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Winning the lottery can be more frightening than exciting for Canadians

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If you play the lottery regularly, you probably love that interval between the time you buy the ticket and when the numbers are drawn.

You get to dream a little about what you’ll do with all those millions if you win. You conjure fantasies about quitting your job, lying on a beach, paying cash for your dream house and studding the driveway with toys or playing lady bountiful to your family. That’s what the lottery ads suggest, anyway.

The dream almost always evaporates after you check your numbers. But for the rare few, that moment makes the dream real. And that can be a daunting prospect.

Suddenly, you’re confronted with the challenge of actually making decisions about the equivalent of several lifetimes’ earnings for the average person. No one could blame you for being intimidated.

In B.C., for instance, someone came forward Monday to claim a $50-million Lotto Max price just days before the March 14, 2014, ticket was set to expire.

It’s the longest anyone has ever waited to bring in a winning ticket, said Chris Fairclough, senior communications adviser for the B.C. Lottery Corp.

“This would be the latest and the greatest amount,” he told Yahoo Canada News on Tuesday.

The previous record stood since 2008, when a man waited 48 weeks to cash in a $3.6-million ticket.

“He knew he had won, put it in a safety deposit box and enjoyed life knowing he was financially set,” said Fairclough. “I’ve heard through the grapevine he’s doing exceptionally well.”

It’s not something Fairclough recommends, however.

“I’d rather think about it while the money is accruing interest in the bank,” he said.

Fairclough said the reason for the long delay won’t be revealed until the winner is officially introduced sometime after the claim is verified.

But it’s understandable why some big jackpot winners might be reluctant to step forward and claim their prizes, sometimes for months. Maybe the idea of hitting it big is sometimes easier to cope with than the reality.

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It happens, lottery officials say, but it’s rare.

Big lottery prize-winners often shocked

“I really haven’t heard of many people saying that they’ve been intimidated by the win,” Tony Bitoni, spokesman for the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. (OLG), said in an interview. “Everyone is shocked, dumbfounded by it. They just can’t believe that it’s happened.”

"There’s very little evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, that winners deliberately wait until the last moment to collect big prizes," Dr. Mark Griffiths, director of the International Gaming Research Unit at Nottingham Trent University in England, said via email.

"What normally happens is that just before the deadline is reached, there are increasing numbers of media stories saying there are unclaimed big prizes and this is when people go and check their tickets."

Bitoni said intentional delays usually originate with prize winners who’re looking at paydays in the high multi-millions.

“I would say it’s in the $30 million to $50 million that take a little bit of time,” he said “They know that this is life changing and they’re not sure what they’re going to do. It really is a disbelief that this has happened to me.”

They most often take that time to get outside guidance.

“They’ll tell us that they’ve waited so that they can contact their lawyers or financial advisers, talk to their family, that type of thing, before they even come in,” Bitoni said.

If a ticket worth $5,000 or more is checked at a retailer, the computer signals the OLG’s support centre to get in immediate contact with the winner at the store to arrange for them to claim their prize. Some come right away, others prefer to touch base with family first.

“We wait sometimes 24 hours, sometimes two weeks, sometimes two months, sometimes almost a year,” Bitoni said.

But sometimes people who know they’ve won keep their golden ticket under their metaphorical hats, like the 20-year-old man who won a $40-million jackpot.

Winner verified ticket, then vanished

“He kind of disappeared,” said Andrea Marantz, communications director for Western Canada Lottery Corp., which manages gaming on the Prairies.

“We knew he had checked the ticket at a retailer and then we didn’t hear from him. He didn’t make an appointment to come in and claim the prize. It took some time. What he said was that he was completely overwhelmed.”

The young man used the time to go home and talk to his dad, who who helped him get professional support and lay out a plan before coming forward.

“He recognized that he was young and he said ‘this is a huge opportunity and I don’t want to blow it,“ Marantz said.

Edmonton-area residents Andrea and Bill Groner waited seven months to claim their $50-million Lotto Max prize.

“That was one that was making us a little nervous, too,” Marantz said. “Really, they knew the day after the draw that they had that winning ticket and that just didn’t take it any further.”

“The best way that they could explain it is that they wanted to be completely prepared before they claimed that money. They wanted to make plans for it. They just felt they weren’t ready to go anywhere near it until they had a whole plan in place.”

But most delays are far more prosaically explained. People don’t bother to check their tickets or lose track of them.

“We had one lady that was spring cleaning and found a Lotto Max ticket that was almost expired and was worth $500,000,” Bitoni recalled.

“We had another gentleman that bought the ticket in between the winter and the fall, put it in his jacket pocket. When it got colder he put that jacket away for the winter.

“Come the fall-winter again, he took that jacket out, went into the pocket, took out the ticket [and] it was $100,000. He was one day away from expiry.”

Another prize winner, an Ontario teacher, stuck his ticket on the fridge in June while he went on a summer backpacking trip through Europe.

“When he came back in August, ready to go back to school, he saw the ticket on there, went to the gas station, filled up his car, checked the ticket and he won $21 million,” said Bitoni.

Winning lottery ticket stashed in broken purse

Marantz remembers a woman who came closest to missing the one-year deadline for a big Lotto 6/49 prize.

“She had the ticket in a purse and the handle of the purse broke,” said Marantz.

“She’d just thrown it in the back of her closet and here it was almost a year later and she thought ‘I should take that purse and get that handle fixed,’ dug it out of the back of the closet and found this ticket in it. It was literally within days of expiring.”

But maybe the most ironic big-prize claim came from a man in Saskatoon, who Marantz said walked around for weeks with a ticket worth between $20 million and $30 million.

“He said, ‘I figured as long as I didn’t check my ticket I could still pretend it was me.’ ” Marantz remembered. “He was just so used to having it end up being nothing that he thought he’d pretend for a while.”