Woman wins $40m, not $40k: Toronto woman Maria Carreiro won $40 million but initially, she was under the impression she won a thousand times less than that. After winning, Carreiro and her husband will take honeymoon in Hawaii after 30 years of marriage, she said.
Carreiro, a former factory worker and stay-at-home mother, said she did a “happy dance” after she won the prize, according to the National Post.
“When I went to the machine I just see 40 because I’d never won this amount of money. I told [the clerk] can you check this for me please? He checks it. He doesn’t even know himself and he’s the store owner. I said ‘Never mind, I’ll go home,’” she told the paper.
“I went home and I told my daughter, ‘Oh I won $40,000.’ She’s jumping off the bed too and then she calls her [sister] and says, ‘Mommy won $40,000,’” she said.
But when her daughter checked the computer to see how much they won, she realized her mother’s mistake.
“I run down the street [to the store] like a crazy woman and check the lottery ticket and it says $40-million and I go ‘Oh my God,’” she said after realizing that she won $40 million, or a thousand times more than what she previously thought.
When asked what she will spend her money on, she said, “The first thing I’m going to do is look for a nice big new house. And then I’m going to pamper myself - buy new clothes for myself and my husband and buy things for my kids that I couldn’t buy before,” according to the Canada Newswire.
“Now it’s time to relax together with my husband. We never had a honeymoon, thirty years ago, so now it’s time. We’re going to Hawaii!” Carreiro added.
