It’s good to be Jeremy Scramstad.
The Surrey resident has won the $1 million Maxmillion lotto prize after matching all seven numbers on the June 1st Lotto Max draw.
After buying his winning ticket at the Strawberry Hill Town Pantry, he folded it, put it in his pocket and forgot about it.
“I was getting coffee on my lunch break, saw my lottery ticket and decided to scan it,” Scramstad said. “When it said a million dollars, I went back to my van to double and triple check the numbers on the Lotto! App.”
When he shared the big news with his wife, he said, “We both just started screaming with excitement.” He waited until she had finished work to tell her.
The gasfitter by trade is seeing a trip to Disneyland and perhaps a “house or a boat on the lake” in his future, as his family has recently moved from Clayton Heights to the Okanagan.
“It will make life less stressful and allow me to enjoy time with my family,” he said.
Though Scramstad is definitely heading down the road less travelled, he does have company.
In May 2013, for example, Surrey resident Harry Black, at age 66, won what you could call a lottery lottery, bagging $31.6 million on the 6/49. He scored a double win by buying two lottery tickets with the same numbers; numbers he’d been playing for 35 years. Had he only one winning ticket instead of two, he would have won only — insert ‘ahem’ here — $21 million.
There have also been made-in-Surrey court battles over lottery wins, such as in 2012 when two former business partners fought over whether a $12.6 million should be kept by one of the women, or shared. The 6/49 lottery ticket was drawn in November 2008, when the litigants were in a catering business together, delivering sandwiches and drinks to work sites in Surrey.
In 2011, Skip Yeng won a $3.8 million Lotto 6/49 jackpot after buying his winning ticket at the lottery ticket centre in Surrey’s Central City.
The year before that, Derek and Francis Bird of Guildford won $25 million, which at that time was a record-setting lottery prize win in B.C. Both had been postal workers prior to the monster win. The winning $11 Lotto Max ticket was bought at the Save-On-Foods at 152nd Street and Fraser Highway.
Derek usually bought the lottery tickets. But on that particular occasion, Francis did.
“I never buy,” she said at the time, with a shrug.
And a little more than a decade ago, on Father’s Day 2008, Surrey’s Gary Sobolik won $21.9 million in the Lotto 6/49 draw after buying a Quick Dip ticket at the Family Lucky Holdings lottery kiosk outside the Safeway grocery store at Sunshine Hills in North Delta.
Lucky, indeed.
tom.zytaruk@surreynowleader.com
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