After his weekly meal at a Chinese restaurant, a North Carolina man used the numbers in his fortune cookie to enter the lottery.
And now he’s $4 million richer.
“I don’t normally play my fortune cookie numbers, but I tried them on a whim,” Gabriel Fierro, 60, said of Cornelius, a disabled veteran who served in the military for 32 years, in a North Carolina Education Lottery release.
Fierro and his wife ate weekly at Charlotte’s Red Bowl restaurant. He then used the numbers to buy a Mega Millions ticket online and added $1 to turn it into a Megaplier ticket. So when he matched all five white balls to win $1 million on January 18, it quadrupled.
His $4 million prize became the biggest win in the history of online play in North Carolina, according to the lottery.
“I got an email in the morning and just stared at it in amazement,” said Fierro. “I took it and showed it to my wife and she thought it was an April 1 joke or maybe a scam.”
Fierro received $2,840,401 after federal and state taxes.
This isn’t the first time the cookies have become fortunes for lottery players.
So… where are you dinner tonight?