The married Dunedin couple who won $13.3 million in Powerball's $40 million draw have spoken about taking the biggest prize ever in Otago.
The winning couple, who want to remain anonymous, knew straight away that they'd won.
"I was watching the live Lotto draw, and circled all of our winning numbers - including the Powerball," the wife said.
"I was so excited, I didn't know what to do. My husband was in the other room so I hollered out to him."
"My first thought was 'oh no, I bet she's pregnant'," her husband laughed.
But even when his wife showed him the Lotto ticket and the winning numbers, he still didn't believe that they'd won.
So they phoned friends to come over to help them check the ticket again.
"Everyone was saying ‘yes, you've won', but he still didn't believe it," said the wife.
"Even when we found out that the winning ticket had been bought from Pak 'n Save Dunedin, which is where we bought out ticket from, he was like 'nah, no way'".
The winners decided to ask around their friends to see if there was any other way they could check their ticket, which is when John and Julie Moyle opened Fresh Choice Green Island supermarket in Dunedin so they could check their ticket.
"The Lotto lady had to get out of bed to come down and help check the ticket for us. It wasn't until the Lotto machine made the winning noise and we saw the prize claim receipt that he finally believed it," said the wife.
"I have a copy of the claim receipt with $13,368,688 written on it. I pulled it out of my pocket to look at about 100 times yesterday," the husband said.
"As for the winning ticket, I kept it in my undies drawer until we had to bring it up to Auckland to collect our prize. No one would ever go looking in there," he laughed.
"It's funny because I was in my man cave out the back of the house a couple of weeks ago with my buddy and we were talking about what we'd if we won Lotto - we were talking about bikes, muscle cars, houses.
"It's amazing to think I can do all that now if I want to.
"At one point we were talking about buying a whole street of houses and getting all of our mates to move in. I'm not sure I'll do that though," he laughed.
After checking their ticket at Fresh Choice Green Island supermarket late on Saturday night, the winners then flew up to Auckland to claim their prize in person at Lotto NZ's head office first thing this morning.
"To win this amount of money is incredible and we keep thinking about how we'll be able to help people out with our winnings. We feel so incredibly lucky.
"But we'll stay the same people. In fact, I think we might go out for burgers tonight to celebrate," the wife laughed.
