SALEM — Now would be a good time for pack rats with a penchant for playing lotto to look through their stuff.
The New Hampshire Lottery is looking for the lucky person who bought a winning $10,000 Powerball ticket in Salem last January. That person is about to become less lucky: the chance to claim the prize expires at 4 p.m. on Jan. 28 — exactly a year after the drawing.
"Unclaimed, prize-winning tickets, it does happen," said Maura McCann, a lottery spokeswoman. "However, most of the time, it's the $1, the $2 the $3 prizes, that sort of thing."
The big ticket matched four of the five winning numbers (5-18-23-32), and also the Powerball number, 4. It was purchased at a convenience store on South Broadway, along the state line, that was then called M&N Border Store, but is now named First in NH.
The store's owner, Yogi Patel, said he has not heard from anybody claiming to have the winning ticket. But the store did get at least one call yesterday from somebody who heard about the unclaimed ticket and wanted to check the numbers. A store clerk, Raj Banchal of Salem, read the numbers over the phone.
"I feel very bad for the person who lost the ticket," Patel said. "This time of the economy, it's very bad to lose $10,000."
He said with so little time left to claim the ticket, he is not sure anybody will come forward.
"By the end of this month, if nobody claims it, it's done," he said. "If they find it afterwards, that's not going to help because they cannot claim it."
A representative from the state lottery came to his store and put up signs seeking the owner of the ticket.
"(Customers) see the sign, you know, they feel bad for the person who lost it," Patel said. "And they will check their own tickets. ... It could be them."
While most unclaimed tickets are small prizes, there have been tickets worth $100,000 that have expired in the past without being claimed, McCann said. The state lottery tracks winning tickets, and when they are worth several thousand dollars or more, they try to get the message out about the unclaimed winnings.
"Does a significant one happen very often? No," McCann said. "Maybe, probably four or five times during the course of the year."
But with the days closing in on the deadline, what are the chances that whoever won still has that $10,000 slip of paper lying around?
"I can't really recall anybody swooping in within days or hours of it setting to expire," McCann said. "However, I do know people that hang on to their tickets for a good amount of time prior to claiming to them."
Patel is urging his customers to look carefully through old tickets.
"Dig your stuff through, go through whatever you put the ticket in," he said. "And find it and claim it before time runs out."
The ticket can be checked at a terminal at any of the 1,200 New Hampshire Lottery retailers, but the prize must be claimed at lottery headquarters in Concord by the deadline.
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The winning ticket matched four of the five numbers and matched the Powerball number of 4. The store was called M&N Border Store when that ticket was purchased approximately a year ago, but it now is known as First in NH.
