Winning $50K Lottery Ticket From Hermantown Remains Unclaimed

There's a $50,000 lottery winner in the Northland that still hasn't claimed their prize.  Maybe the winning ticket is in their pocket.  Perhaps they've been at the cabin and haven't come back to town yet to turn it in. Or, maybe the ticket exists at the bottom of their truck cab and they don't even know that they're a winner.

The winning Minnesota Lottery Powerball ticket for October 9, 2021 was sold at the Kwik Trip store in Hermantown (store #216).  But as of this writing (on October 21), that $50,000 prize remains officially unclaimed.

If you're a regular Powerball player that buys tickets from that location, it might be worth a look through your ticket slips to check the numbers against the ones that were drawn on that evening.

For a variety of reasons, the Minnesota Lottery doesn't publicize winning Powerball numbers after the fact. You can spot-check your numbers using the 'Check My Numbers' feature on their website; you'll need the ticket to enter the date and the numbers to run a computerized check against the lotteries central computer system.  "To confirm that a ticket is a winner....have the ticket validated through a sales terminal at any Minnesota Lottery retailer".

A quick look at the Minnesota Lottery 'Unclaimed Prizes' page shows that there are a number of larger tickets that remain.  Two "Raffle" tickets - each worth $100,000 remain unclaimed since the January 1, 2021 drawing; seven $50,000 Powerball tickets are still without a match for the winning ticket holder (including the October 9 Hermantown winner), and three Northstar Cash tickets (worth $27,000 or $25,000 depending on which you're talking about) are still out there.

There's also a tab to check winning scratch tickets, but the lottery doesn't list those specific tickets - as they are too numerous to mention.  Some of these include $500,000 winning tickets that are still unclaimed.

So how long does the Minnesota Lottery hold unclaimed winning prizes?  Their website details that "you have one year from the date a game closes to claim a prize".  Tickets - even if they have numbers that match those drawn - are ineligible for prizes after that time.

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Ever wonder what happens to prizes that remain unclaimed after that one year window?  That depends on the game.  "In Minnesota, all of the unclaimed prize money goes to the state General Fund."  For larger, multi-state lottery games, "[u]nclaimed jackpots...would go back to the participating states based on the percentage of sales that they contributed to the prize fund".