KITCHENER -- A mother-daughter team plan on buying houses near one another after they won Cash for Life.
Amanda McInnis said she was at the store when the clerk suggested she buy the ticket.
"At first I said no, but then I changed my mind," she told staff at the OLG Prize Centre in Toronto.
She got home and scratched the ticket, which is when she saw the LIFE symbol three times. She said she thought she was "hallucinating" or "dreaming" when she saw them.
She called her 23-year-old daughter, Jennifer Kemp, on Facetime and asked her to help verify the win.
"I saw her face and I thought something was wrong," Kemp told OLG staff. "I didn't think it was real."
The grand prize is for $1,000 per week for life, but the pair opted to take the lump sum prize of $675,000 instead. That works out to almost 13 years of weekly $1,000 payments.
McInnis said she plans on buying a house in the country with a backyard that her son can play in, while her daughter planned on buying a house close to her mom.
The winning ticket was purchased at Circle K on Hespeler Road in Cambridge. The OLG says that the game has odds of winning a prize is 1 in 3.45.
The OLG had closed its prize centre to appointments because of COVID-19, but recently reopened by appointment. Prizes of $50,000 or over have to be claimed in person—otherwise the agency encourages people to mail in their claims.
