Frances and Patrick Connolly experienced the best start to the new year. The couple from County Down in Northern Ireland, grabbed one of the biggest UK Lottery wins in history. They decided to go public with the news later that week and announced that they would share the prize with 50 friends and relatives. "This is a massive sum of money and we want it to have a huge impact on the lives of other people we know and love, as well as on our future," explained Frances, 52, a teacher. The couple have the aim of really making a difference to their own lives and the lives of the people around them. Patrick explained how his wife ‘nagged’ him to purchase a ticket. He gave in and bought a ticket online using the lucky dip option. He did so without any expectation as they had not won more than £10 before. Patrick casually checked the numbers before going to bed that night and discovered that he had all the winning numbers along with the lucky numbers. 

Michelle De Roma, from Surrey, British Columbia, bought last week’s winning ticket during a boxing day shopping trip at the Tsawwassen Mills outlet mall. Her winnings amounted to a massive, $39,517,071. De Roma said that the first person that she told of her stroke of luck, was the number one love of her life, her husband. She explained how it was his birthday which made the ticket the perfect gift for him. Michelle didn’t come forward straight away to announce her winnings said that her 3 children didn’t even know about it until it was announced. "I just want a nice house for my kids," she said. "And I want to travel. Everybody wants to travel." “I really want to go to Rome — St. Peter's Basilica — with my mother-in-law. She wanted to go there," 

Thomas Ronemous, from Waterloo, Iowa, won a top prize playing Iowa Lottery’s “Cash Line” scratch game. Ronemous bought his winning ticket at New Star Liquor, 1625 W, Fourth St. in Waterloo. He then took it home to scratch it later. "The very first number I matched," he explained. "I usually don't scratch off how much I win until I get through the whole card, but for some reason I did. I saw $50 and I thought I won $50, and I thought, 'All right, cool, that's good.' He then spotted part of a zero, continued scratching and was shocked to discover that he had won the $50,000 top prize. It was the 11^th of the 14 top prizes in the game.

Adam Hansell received an amazing, belated Christmas gift of $4,000,000 at the holiday gas station located at I-75 Business Spur in Sault Ste. Marie. “I’d bought a couple of tickets, and kept winning small amounts” explained Hansell. He felt as though luck was on his side. “I bought a $30 ticket and won my money back, so I decided to try the $4,000,000 winner” As he scratched the ticket off in the store, his life and the life of his family would change, almost in an instant. “I was stunned when I saw that I had the $4 million winner” said Adam. 

Andrew Clark, 51, from Boston, Lincolnshire who’s been piling up lottery tickets in his van for ages has found out he’s the winner of $86,000,000 with Euro Millions! Clark called himself the man who nearly lost £76M after explaining the story of how he’d always buy tickets and not check them until his family heard in the local news that there was a local prize unclaimed and began pressuring Clark to check his ticket. This literally went on for weeks before he finally gave in and went through checking his entire stash of tickets one evening, not surprisingly – he'd won a massive prize (the 12th biggest prize won in the UK) and now says he is pleased that his partner and her niece convinced him to check. 

Christmas has definitely come early for Peter DeLuca, 51 from Sterling Heights in Michigan who has won a $1,000,000 prize with the Michigan Lottery. DeLuca purchased the winning ticket from the Kroger store which is located at 43893 Schoenherr Road in Sterling Heights, and explained that he bought lottery tickets every so often when the jackpot would grow very big, and worth taking your chances on. What’s funny is that he actually forgot about the ticket after leaving it in his car for a few days, until he remembered and found it on a Wednesday. Deluca then proceeded to take the ticket to a 7-Eleven where a clerk could check the ticket, but she told him that the prize was so big she couldn’t cash it for him, so she printed the ticket and he was able to check it himself, finding he’d matched all five white balls which were: 11, 14, 32, 43 and 65 for the October 13th drawing. 

A Montana resident was surprised to realise that a $50,000 winning ticket she wanted to throw away was saved by her brother. Virginia Busko-Gewald explained to Montana Lottery officials that she was motivated by her brother's lottery-playing habit to buy lottery tickets at the Great Falls Albertsons. Even though her brother is a regular player, she couldn’t decide what game to play, so she went for the first lottery game the shop clerk suggested: Powerball. Busko-Gewald added that she intends to pay some bills, pay a visit to her nephew in Korea and also to her niece in New York.