Woman cleaning her closet finds box of lottery tickets and wins $100,000

Cleaning out the closet had a huge payout for one lucky woman.

Alfreda Hawkins stumbled upon a box in a closet in her home with Virginia Lottery tickets.

Hawkins started scratching the tickets, and one of them revealed a $100,000 prize.

‘I almost passed out!’ she told lottery officials.

‘It was amazing!’

The ticket belonged to the $100,000 Extreme Cash game. She had purchased it at a Shop & Go convenience store at 1627 Mechanicsville Turnpike in Richmond. It was not clear when.

Hawkins has not yet figured out what she will do with her new fortune, according to the Virginia Lottery last Thursday.

She was pictures smiling and holding a larger-than-life green Virginia Lottery check with her name, $100,000, and the date of September 12.

Hawkins landed the third and last prize for the Extreme Cash game, meaning that it will be closed. The Virginia Lottery ends scratcher games after the final top prize is claimed. The odds of winning the top prize in that game were one in 1,101,600, and the odds of winning any prize were one in 4.18.

The Virginia Lottery offers dozens of other scratcher games that are still active.

Hawkins’ hometown of Richmond got more than $22.5million in lottery money for Kindergarten to 12th grade public education in fiscal year 2025.

The Virginia Lottery last fiscal year provided over $901million to K-12 education statewide, making up about 10% of the system’s total budget.

Hawkins is one of the latest Americans to win lottery money after a weird twist in fate.

In 2022, a Wisconsin man whose wife sent him to a Pick ‘N Save grocery store in Fond du Lac to buy hot dogs saw a sign for the Badger 5 jackpot and bought $10 worth of the game. He went home to discover that he had the numbers to win a more than $100,000 prize.