Sheldon, Iowa — The lottery ticket was purchased now over a month ago, but the winner still hasn’t come forward. And now the state wants to cut the amount of time that winners have to claim their winnings.
On November 5th of this year, someone purchased a PowerBall ticket at the Hy-Vee C-Store in Sheldon. The person who bought the ticket also purchased the PowerPlay option. When the winning numbers were announced, the player didn’t match all the numbers to win the multi-million-dollar prize, but did match enough that with the PowerPlay option, they won $150,000. The status of the winner and their ticket is unknown. Someone could be sitting on it on purpose, or it could have been thrown away when they thought it wasn’t a winner. We may never know.
Meanwhile, the Iowa Lottery Board has approved a change that will cut the time players in multi-state lotto games have to claim their prize from a winning ticket from 365 to 180 days. Iowa Lottery vice president, Mary Neubauer, says Iowa is one of only 14 states which have a one-year claim period — while 33 states have 180-day time limits. Neubauer says they started looking into the issue after continually seeing unclaimed prizes of all amounts.
The change would impact the Powerball, MegaMillions, Lucky for Life, and Lotto America games. The claim periods for other Iowa Lottery products will not change. Neubauer told the Lottery Board they started studying the issue by looking at one single drawing day and its prize redemptions.
She says they then expanded the research to several more days and got the same result.
Neubauer says decreasing the amount of time players have to cash in tickets will allow them to get the unclaimed money back into the prize pool.
Neubauer says they don’t have a firm date for when they will change the prize expiration time limit, because there has to be a transition period. That means the Sheldon winner still has until 365 days from the date of the drawing.
Neubauer says they need to complete testing on the statewide gaming system before the change can be implemented. The lottery anticipates making the change in the first quarter of calendar year 2023.
