If the winner of the Oct. 23 $1.5 billion Mega Millions jackpot doesn’t step forward in the next few months, every state that participated could get a piece of the pie.
“Everyone’s talking about it,” Jee Patel, the manager of the KC Mart in Simpsonville, S.C., that sold the winning ticket, told Fox News. “It’s a mystery.”
According to CBS affiliate WLTX in South Carolina, the winning ticket was sold in Simpsonville, and the winner has 180 days to claim the prize. Time’s up April 21.
If the winner misses the deadline, "each participating state in the Mega Millions game will get back all the money that state contributed to the unclaimed jackpot," the Mega Millions website notes, adding "each state uses its unclaimed lottery prizes for different purposes."
The jackpot is one of the largest prizes in history; the largest was a Powerball drawing for a record $1.586 billion in January 2016.
South Carolina lets lottery winners remain anonymous in order to preserve their privacy, but authorities still need to be able to confirm the winner’s identity, lottery Chief Operating Officer Tony Cooper, told Fox News.
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