Iowa Man Wins $1M Lottery Prize After Ticket Printing Mistake

An Iowa man brought home a $1 million lottery prize -- after the clerk made a mistake printing his tickets, Zoe Sottile reported for CNN.

Photo Insert: The odds of winning the $1 million prize in the Iowa Lottery's Mega Millions game are just 1 in 12,607,306

Josh Buster, a 40-year-old chef from West Burlington, asked for five "easy-pick" plays for the April 15 Mega Millions drawing at a convenience store, according to the Iowa Lottery.

But Buster says that the clerk initially printed just one play, and then printed the four remaining plays on a separate ticket. "I feel like that changed the numbers that I would have gotten if he had put them all on one instead of making that mistake," Buster said.

Buster struggled to believe his luck at first. "I don't usually have good luck, so I thought it was a mistake and there was going to be an error," he said in the news release.

"So I Googled the lottery numbers to make sure I had the right ones, and I did! And then the rest of the day, I'm just waiting to wake up from a dream."

The winning chef will use his prize money to pay off his car, pay off his mother's mortgage, and save for his retirement. "It will take away a lot of my stress in my life -- no more of the financial worries," he told the Iowa Lottery.

The odds of winning the $1 million prize in the Iowa Lottery's Mega Millions game are just 1 in 12,607,306, according to their website.

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