As travelers, employees and those seeing off loved ones walk the corridor near the atrium at Richmond International Airport, two Virginia Lottery vending machines beckon to all who pass with the possibility of riches.
Succumbing to the temptation has paid off for one unknown person who took home the $217 million Powerball jackpot on Wednesday night. The cash option is worth about $136.4 million.
Lottery officials did not know Thursday who purchased the ticket, which had the winning numbers of 5-27-36-38-41 and 12 as the Powerball.
The odds of winning the top prize in the Powerball game are listed as 1 in 175,223,510.
John Hagerty, a spokesman with the Virginia Lottery, said the winner hadn’t come forward by late Thursday, but that wasn’t unusual.
“It’s still pretty early for a winner of this magnitude to come forward,” he said. “We’ve had winners come in the very next day, and we’ve had some wait several months. I guess I would say two to three weeks is fairly standard.”
A winner has 180 days to claim the prize and must appear in person at the lottery’s Richmond headquarters or at one its other seven offices statewide, Hagerty said.
The airport handles about 105,000 landings and takeoffs annually, and the authority that runs it said 3,167,294 passengers used the facility in 2012.
And because the two ticket machines are in an area that isn’t restricted to ticketed passengers, those machines also can be accessed by family members and friends welcoming passengers or seeing them off, not to mention airport employees or airline workers.
“In the course of a year, maybe 5 million people could walk by those machines easily,” airport spokesman Troy Bell said.
Anyone walking by the machines Thursday had an additional temptation. At midmorning, the Virginia Lottery put a banner and a poster on the wall above the machines noting that the winning ticket for the $217 million drawing had been sold there.
“I was amazed by the speed of the Virginia Lottery folks to put the ‘$217 million’ banner and poster together,” Bell said.
After the banner went up, Bell said, activity at the machines was understandably steady.
“I would guess that sales have been well above average today,” he added.
The Virginia Lottery put a self-service machine at the airport years ago but took it out while the facility underwent a massive renovation project. The machine was put back near the atrium in 2009 after the construction was finished, and not long after that, a second machine was added.
“One machine wasn’t meeting the demand,” Bell said. “There were occasionally lines, so a second machine was added.”
The winner will have a choice of taking the full jackpot in 30 annual payments or a one-time cash option of about $136.4 million before taxes.
The largest jackpot ever won by a lottery ticket purchased in Virginia was $239 million, won by J.R. and Peggy Triplett of Winchester in a 2004 Mega Millions drawing.
According to the terms of the Virginia Lottery’s dealer incentive program, retailers who sell winning tickets are eligible for rewards, with the top amount being $50,000 for any prize of $5 million or more.
Had Wednesday night’s winning ticket been sold by a convenience store, that store would have been given $50,000 by the Virginia Lottery. But since the ticket came from a self-service machine in a public location, there will be no retailer reward.
While unusual, it is not unheard of for a vending machine to produce a big winner.
In fact, of the eight Virginia jackpot winners in either Powerball or Mega Millions, the most recent winner — a $107 million Mega Millions jackpot on July 1, 2011 — was purchased by Brian McCarthy of McLean at a vending machine in a Giant grocery store in Herndon.
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