The children of an Auckland couple who won $12.75 million in Saturday's Lotto draw suspected their parents were hiding something when they gathered the family to announce their newfound fortune.
Saturday's $25 million Powerball jackpot was shared by two tickets, with one taking $12.75 million and the other taking $12.5 million.
One of the winners, a man, had bought the ticket on MyLotto on Saturday.
He said that when he played, he sometimes tweaked the Powerball number on the ticket to one of his preferred numbers.
“Powerball number 3 cropped up twice, so I didn’t change it the second time – and that’s the line we won on,” he said.
That night, his wife was in the bathroom getting ready for bed when he logged on to check his ticket, quickly realising something "extraordinary" was unfolding.
"I suddenly heard him shouting my name," the woman said.
“Then he appeared in the doorway as calm as anything, saying, ‘I think we’ve won Powerball'.
“I wasn’t sure it was real, even after seeing the amount at the top of the ticket – I said 'we need to ring Lotto and check'."
The man said he believed "instantly" they'd won.
“I’ve been buying tickets for a long time, so I knew what I was looking at, and I knew it had to be real,” he said.
The couple kept the win to themselves for a couple of days, eventually deciding to gather their children to share the news.
“I’d seen them since they found out, and they didn’t say a word – they had great poker faces,” one of the children said.
“So when Mum got in touch to say they were coming over to talk to us, I thought something was wrong.
“But then she followed it up with a message saying ‘and then we’ll all go out for dinner’, with a jazz hands emoji, so that calmed me down a bit.”
One of their other children began to suspect something was up after receiving his invite for a "chat".
“It didn’t sound like bad news when Mum was telling me to come over and, coincidentally, I’d just checked my own ticket and hadn’t won, so it made me think that perhaps they were wanting to tell us they were the winners,” he said.
On their way to their daughter's house to make the announcement, the couple stopped off to buy a bottle of champagne, concealing it as they arrived.
"I pulled it out when we told them,” she said.
The family shared the bottle, then went out for dinner.
Now that the win has sunk in, the couple said they were looking forward to helping their children and grandchildren.
They were also planning a couple of holidays in the near future.
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