Wife facing forfeiture, storm evacuee, call center agent claim P10M lotto prizes

MANILA, Philippines — It’s looking like a merry Christmas and a happy new year, for three lucky lotto winners who went to claim their multi-million-peso “gifts” at the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office (PCSO) on Wednesday.

The three had struck the winning combination 14-22-17-10-06-26 of the Megalotto 6/45 game last Dec. 19. They each received P10,326,729.60 of the P30,980,188.80 jackpot.

The luck seemed to have come just in time, especially for the two female winners.

In a press statement, PCSO general manager Jose Ferdinand Rojas II described how one of the winners, a 36-year-old mother of two from Bulacan, burst into tears of happiness as she received her check.

She told Rojas that her family recently received a house forfeiture notice from the bank they were getting loans from, after her husband, an overseas Filipino worker in Saudi Arabia and the sole breadwinner of their family, had stopped sending them money.

While such woes did not hound the other female winner, also 36 years old, from Laguna, she said she and her husband were still struggling in the aftermath of storm “Ondoy” in 2009, so much so that they were still living in an evacuation center.

She told Rojas that apart from investing their prize money in a house and lot and their child’s education, they would also set aside a portion for church donations.

The third winner, a 41-year-old father of five and a call center agent from Sampaloc, Manila, whose six years of betting on the national sweepstakes finally saw fruit, said he would be using the money for house repairs, for his children’s education and a new car.