If you’re thinking of ordering Chinese food tonight, you might want to grab a lotto ticket, too.
That’s the take-away from one Pennsylvania resident’s $1 million win this summer. In July, longtime lottery enthusiast Ronnie Martin played numbers he found in a local restaurant’s fortune cookie on three Mega Millions tickets. To his shock, the Long Pond, Pa., resident actually won a chunk of that night’s $543 million jackpot.
Martin purchased the ticket at a gas station he frequents in nearby Hope, NJ, and New Jersey Lotto released details from his sweet success story on Friday.
The auspicious slip of paper emerged from a long-gone cookie consumed years ago, and Martin has played the same numbers regularly since finding it.
When Martin realized that his picks perfectly matched the five numbers in the drawing, he was stunned, according to the press release from NJ Lotto: “Ronnie thought [the store clerk] was just messing with him.”
He and his wife plan to pay off their house and bills before saving the rest.
Martin is far from the first lotto winner to find wealth within a fortune cookie’s crunchy folds.
Bronx resident Emma Duvoll took home $2 million in 2014 after playing numbers she found in a treat from Sammy’s Noodle Shop in Greenwich Village. And, in 2000, a retired couple — also from The Bronx — scored a whopping $20 million after taking their chances on a random takeout cookie.
No word on whether any of the winning fortunes said, “You’re going to win the lottery.”