FedEx mistakenly delivered $20,000 worth of lottery scratch cards to an unsuspecting woman in Massachusetts, though she wouldn’t have been able to cash in on any potential winnings.
Danielle Alexandrov was opening packages at her office in East Falmouth when she came across a “very heavy” box, she told local news outlet WCVB.
“I open it up and it’s a box of scratch tickets,” she said. “And I’m thinking, ‘Is this a joke?’ until I look at the receipt and its value is $20,000 worth of scratch tickets.”
According to WCVB, the scratch cards were meant to be sent to the nearby Kenyon’s Market, a liquor store that sells lottery tickets, but somehow ended up at Alexandrov’s workplace.
She decided to return the box, calling it the “right” thing to do, but she said she was troubled by the possibilities of how the scratch tickets could have changed her life.
She told WCVB: “I played the tape out through my mind. What would happen if I kept these? Would I be able to sleep at night? Those kinds of things — and I was like, ‘No, the right thing to do is to go return it.'”
It turns out that even if Alexandrov had kept the scratch cards, they would have been worthless unless they had been delivered and authorized by a licensed lottery retailer.
“If someone tried to take one of these tickets, if it was a winning ticket, brought it to a retail location, there would be a message that would flag it and they’d be unable to cash the ticket,” Christian Teja, who works for the Massachusetts Lottery, told WCVB.