Three unremarkable towns in California, Florida and Tennessee achieved overnight celebrity status as the places where a trio of winning Powerball jackpot tickets were sold, even as the identities of those who will share the record $US1.6 billion prize remained a mystery.
Each of the winning tickets is worth $528.8 million, lottery officials said in California, one of 44 states plus Washington D.C. and two US territories that sold millions of Powerball tickets.
The winning numbers of 8, 27, 34, 4, 19 and Powerball 10, picked in a drawing on Wednesday night (local time), appeared on tickets sold at a 7-Eleven convenience store in Chino Hills, California, a Publix grocery store in Melbourne Beach, Florida and a store in Munford, Tennessee. The chance of having the correct numbers was 1 in 292 million.
"I'm very happy and I really appreciate these guys celebrating this store," said a clerk at the California 7-Eleven who identified himself as M. Faroqui and believes he sold the winning ticket. Cheering crowds swarmed the suburban Los Angeles store and its parking lot late on Wednesday.
Tennessee's top lottery official Rebecca Hargrove was traveling to Munford, a suburb of Memphis, to announce the store that sold one of the jackpot tickets and present the retailer with a $25,000 bonus check, a lottery spokeswoman said.
With each state setting its own lottery rules, the California retailer will get a $1 million bonus for selling the jackpot-winning ticket, while the Florida retailer, located in a tiny coastal town, will get $100,000.
The announcement of the winners came after the previous 19 drawings produced no jackpot winners. With the grand prize rolling over each time, the bounty soared to a record $1.586 billion, fueled by what had become a national preoccupation with Powerball and the prospect of taking home untold riches.
In towns and cities across the country, millions of would-be billionaires, many of them who had never before played a lottery, stood in long lines to buy tickets.
It was the largest lottery prize ever offered in North America, and no other lottery in the world had ever featured a jackpot of that size that could be won on a single ticket.
The winners in Florida and Tennessee have not come forward, lottery officials in those states said, and officials have not said if anyone in California had claimed the prize.
In November, a Tennessee ticket holder claimed a $144.1 million prize.
To receive the full jackpot amount, winners must accept a multi-year annuity, whereas the lump sum cash payout for the jackpot was about $983.5 million, lottery officials said.
For every $1 worth of Powerball sales, half goes to prizes, 40 percent is earmarked for things such as education, and 10 percent goes to retailers who sell the tickets and administrative costs, Grief said.
The cycle will start again on Saturday night when the next Powerball drawing will have an estimated jackpot of $40 million, according to the lottery operator's website.
