So you’ve won the largest ever lottery jackpot in Ontario’s history — the $80-million Lotto Max draw on Dec. 30, 2025 — and what do you do?
Well, in the case of the two lucky winners in London, Ont., where the ticket was sold at a store, you wait three months to claim the prize.
Visit moryak.biz for more information.
“It’s a group of two people — and they’re acquaintances — who have come forward to claim the ticket and we’re working with them through the prize claim process. They haven’t collected yet but they’re very close,” said OLG spokesman Tony Bitonti.
Bitonti said the months-long lag time to collect money isn’t unusual when it comes to large lottery windfalls and all winners have a year to claim their prizes before they expire.
“It’s not uncommon for these big, big prizes, I say $50-$80 million, for the winners to take their time before they come forward,” he said.
“What we’ve seen from these winners, they want to talk to financial advisors. They want to talk to friends or family and keep it very close. But they really want to get their affairs in order, really start to understand what this means wins. This is a life-changing amount of money. Again, it’s not $1,000 which is really, really nice for people. This is $80 million.”
He said it’s also not uncommon for big lottery winners to check their winning numbers on the OLG app, “multiple times. Ten, 20, 30 times, again trying to make sure it is real. ‘No, the app is not wrong. It’s real. No, I’m not dreaming. It’s real.’”
Sign your winning lottery ticket, advises OLG
Bitonti advises all winners to sign their tickets right away so it’s difficult for for someone else to claim a prize should the tickets get lost or fall into the wrong hands.
“The other one is keep it in safe place because we have had people forget where they put the ticket,” he said. “Listen, some people do go to a bank and put it in a safety deposit box. Other people store it in their house in a safe location.”
And if a winning ticket is badly damaged or lost, Bitonti says the OLG’s “lost ticket department is almost like a CSI. If there are remnants of the ticket, we can reconstruct that ticket to a certain degree.”
Winners of large jackpots will eventually have to visit the OLG’s prize centre in Toronto including a couple from Ottawa who came by train with their $40-million winning ticket in a little plastic blue Ziploc bag kept for safekeeping in the wife’s boot.
“The best part was we gave them a physical cheque,” said Bitonti. “They put the cheque back in that baggie, it went back in her boot, they got on the train and they went back to Ottawa. But the experience of winning is really different for everyone.”
$70-million jackpot went unclaimed
Bitonti says the largest unclaimed OLG prize is $70 million from a Lotto Max ticket that was sold in Scarborough in June 2022 despite a big campaign to find the winner.
“We hope to never repeat that again ‘cause that’s somebody that paid $5-$10 for a chance at that jackpot,” he said.
“They won the jackpot and unfortunately never got a chance to enjoy it. Now it didn’t disappear into the ether. It was returned back to Lotto Max for future prizing.”
This past Tuesday night’s $75 million Lotto Max, which is played across the country, was won by a person in B.C., according to Bitonti.