Man wins lottery jackpot one day after missing by single number

Aug. 8 (UPI) -- A Michigan man who was one digit away from winning a Fantasy 5 lottery jackpot ended up winning the jackpot the next day.

The 53-year-old Macomb County man told Michigan Lottery officials he bought his winning Fantasy 5 ticket for the July 27 drawing on MichiganLottery.com.

"I always buy Fantasy 5 tickets if the jackpot is over $250,000," the player said. "I usually buy my tickets in-store, but the night of the drawing I realized I'd forgotten to buy some, so I logged onto MichiganLottery.com and bought two."

The man said he initially didn't realize he had won.

"After the drawing, I saw an email from the lottery that said I had won $1 in the drawing," he said. "I thought that was all I'd won, until another email came through telling me to log into my account to claim my prize. When I logged in and saw $795,905 pending, my first thought was that it was a scam. Now that I am at the lottery office claiming my prize, it's starting to hit me that this is real!"

The winner said his jackpot was made all the more unbelievable by the events of the previous day.

"What's crazy is the night before I matched four out of five numbers on my Fantasy 5 ticket and thought: 'I was so close!' I was excited to win $100 but bummed that I was one number off a large jackpot prize. I never could have imagined then that the next night I would actually win the jackpot," he said.

The winner said he plans to invest his prize money.