Unclaimed Mega Millions ticket worth $197.5M expires Saturday

In December of last year, they bought one of two winning Mega Millions tickets at a Chevron gas station in Encino, and now they are owed $197.5 million in lottery dough.

Until Saturday.

After that, ignorance will be bliss for the would-be moneybags.

“We would love to see the rightful winner get their prize money,” Carolyn Becker, spokesperson for the California Lottery, said Wednesday. But if Saturday’s deadline for claiming the prize passes, “my hypothesis and hope is that the winner never knows.”

This mystery winner was part of an incredibly rare draw for the Mega Millions lottery.

The winning tickets were sold in the same month at the same California gas station — and they were the only two winning tickets in the nation.

Becker couldn’t say exactly how rare an occurrence that is, but she noted that Mega Millions is a multistate game, and California alone has 23,000-plus retailers who sell tickets.

“When this happened last year,” she told The Times, “my mind was like that little emoji where the brain is exploding.”

If the golden ticket holder does not come forward by Saturday, however, there is a silver lining.

The money will go to California schools. Not all of it, though. It becomes the California Lottery’s job to refund money back to the states that contributed to the pot. Becker said about $80.5 million will be returned to the other states, and around $13.8 million will be divvied up among California schools.

Schools have profited regularly from people losing, tossing or otherwise just spacing on their winning lottery tickets.

“It’s fair to say in the last five to 10 years, we have averaged about $40 million to $50 million a year unclaimed,” Becker said of the state’s lottery games.

In October 2025, the California Lottery will mark 40 years since selling its first ticket. Over that time, more than $1 billion has gone unclaimed, she said, “and that all funnels to schools.”

_______