$208 million lottery ticket still unclaimed

Tuesday, August 29, 2006 posted 03:52 PM EDT

The group of 100 Sargento Foods factory workers who claim to have the winning ticket from the Aug. 5 Powerball drawing worth $208.6 million have yet to claim their prize, Wisconsin Lottery spokeswoman Jessica Iverson said today.

“(The ticket) has not yet been validated,” Iverson said.

Iverson said she did not know why the group has not claimed the prize, but said claiming can be more difficult for a large group because there is more legal work involved.

“In Wisconsin, state statute requires we have to pay a single winner unless we have a signed court order that says otherwise,” Iverson said. “If this group is in fact holding the winning ticket, they would need to obtain a court order that spells out how they would want that prize paid out.”

The mostly second-shift cheese factory employees each put $1 into a pool for tickets that were purchased at the Ma and Pa's Grocery Express in Fond du Lac. The multi-million dollar jackpot is the second largest jackpot in Wisconsin Lottery history.

The group has a little more than five months left to claim the prize.

If the prize goes unclaimed, the money would be returned to Wisconsin taxpayers in the form of property tax relief. Iverson said the largest unclaimed lottery prize was a $1 million Megabucks drawing in the early 1990s.

“My guess is that the winner will step forward before this expires,” Iverson said.

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