Woman Agrees To Pay For Wrong Lottery Ticket, Then Wins $5 Million

A woman who accidentally received the wrong lottery ticket from a cashier and decided to buy it anyway made the right move.

Oksana Zaharov, 46, from Edgewater, New Jersey, was shopping in Manhattan when she asked a clerk for a $1 New York Lottery scratch-off ticket. Instead, the man unwittingly handed her a $10 Set For Life ticket.

Zaharov noticed the mistake. “When the clerk handed me the wrong ticket I felt bad, so I decided to just go ahead and buy it,” the mother of two told the lottery in a press release. “I actually used the ticket as a bookmark for a couple weeks before I decided to scratch it.”

Now she can buy a whole lot of bookmarks. Zaharov won $5 million to be distributed over 20 years, plus annual net sums of $172,068 after that for the rest of her life.

Her stroke of luck went viral on Tuesday as news outlets learned of it.

“I never win anything,” she told the lottery. “I was sure the ticket was fake. It wasn’t until I brought it into the office that I knew it was for real.”

Zaharov hopes to take her family on a Bahamas vacation and plans to fund her children’s college education.

HuffPost reached out to her ― and we swear it wasn’t for a loan but rather to see if she wants to comment on her win.