Restaurant staff in New Jersey think they have winning Powerball lottery ticket, go crazy, then have to deal with reality

The ‘winning’ numbers the group had matched the Wednesday draw, not the Saturday draw, which would have seen them collect $900m (£623m)

Restaurant workers in New Jersey were dealt a cruel blow when they thought they had collectively won the Powerball lottery jackpot worth $900m (£623m) on Saturday, only to find out their numbers matched a different draw.

For around 20 minutes the staff at the Grissini restaurant had believed they were millionaires. The pool had included 42 employees at the restaurant, from cooks to valets, and the winnings would have seen them take home around $21m each. One employee quit his job on the spot before reality brought them crashing down to earth.

Footage from the moment the workers thought they had won the lottery shows people leaping around and hugging each other with screams and shouts of “wow” and “Oh my God!”

Charles Poveromo, a bartender at the Grissini restaurant, told CBS2 News: “I got a text from a friend of mine and he sent me numbers which we thought were the winning numbers, but it turned out to be Wednesday night’s numbers.”

Mr Poveromo said he called his wife to tell her the news but she urged caution and asked him to double check the numbers. When he visited the lottery website, Mr Poveromo discovered the numbers from the draw had been updated, and “there was a whole set of different numbers”.

The numbers the pool had on their lottery ticket correlated with last Wednesday’s draw, not the Saturday draw, which they had played.

But the group has not been deterred by the loss and have instead banded together for the next draw, CBS2 News reported.