Illinois ticketholder wins Mega Millions jackpot of $1.28bn

Jackpot surpasses billion dollars for third time in two decades

The winning Mega Millions ticket for the $1.28bn (£1.05bn) jackpot has been sold in Illinois, but the winner is still unknown.

“There is one jackpot-winning ticket, which was sold in Illinois,” Ohio Lottery Commission spokesperson Marie Kilbane told The Washington Post.

The jackpot on the Mega Millions site now stands at $20m.

It’s the third time in two decades that the jackpot surpassed a billion dollars. According to Mega Millions, the lump-sum winning payout for the jackpot on Friday is estimated to be $747.2m. The winner can choose to take that or be paid the full jackpot in instalments over 29 years, according to the BBC.

The numbers on the winning ticket were 13, 36, 45, 57 and 67, as well as a Mega Ball of 14. The interest was so high that the Mega Millions website became impossible to access because of the “high volume of traffic” following the drawing at 11pm on Friday.

The jackpot came close to record levels after 29 drawings in a row without a winner with a ticket including all six winning numbers.

The last winning ticket was sold in Tennessee, when the jackpot was $20m on 15 April.

According to the California Lottery, a ticketholder in the state won $2.9m on Tuesday for matching five numbers, but they didn’t get the Mega number. The jackpot at that time was $830m.

The record jackpot won in the history of the Mega Millions lottery was in October 2018 when $1.537bn was won by a ticketholder in South Carolina.

The lump-sum payout at that time was $878m, according to CBS News. The winner has remained anonymous.

The jackpot also passed the billion-dollar mark last year when four members of a lottery club in suburban Detroit, Michigan, won $1.05bn. They also stayed anonymous.

Previous winners have purchased homes, settled debts and helped the areas where they lived. But others have been destroyed by their winnings as the new-found wealth has led to anxiety and fear, as reported by The Post.

The Mega Millions lottery is played in 45 states, as well as in Washington, DC and the US Virgin Islands. Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada and Utah don’t participate.

A ticketholder’s chance of winning Mega Millions is around one in 303 million – they’re 70 times more likely to be killed by a shark and 216 times more likely to be struck by lightning this year, according to The Post.

Harvard statistics lecturer Mark Glickman told the paper that the chance that someone win goes up as more people buy tickets.

“Once the pot gets up to this range, there are enough people playing that the odds are someone is going to pick the right numbers,” he said.