Will We Celebrate A $5 Win? You KNOW It!

Today, we celebrated with a guy who is NOT a big prize winner. And it was all his idea!

Justin Palmieri visited our Cedar Rapids regional office this afternoon to claim a $5 prize. Yep, you read it right: He won $5.

Justin, who operates a local food truck in Cedar Rapids, says he always sees pictures of lottery winners getting oversized checks when they claim huge prizes. And he wondered if we’d give him a check for the $5 he won in the Loose Change Progressive InstaPlay game.

When he reached out to us on Facebook, we told him to come on in today when our offices would be open after the long holiday weekend! Justin’s initial reaction: “When you guys said yes, I was like, ‘Wait, no way! Somebody’s just pulling my chain!’”

But we weren’t kidding. And we gave him the red-carpet treatment, complete with a ceremonial check with lots of exclamation points on it, if not lots of zeroes. And yes, Justin put on his winner T-shirt from the lottery before we took his photo!

Through the years, we’ve had a couple other winners of small prizes ask if they could have an oversized check, and we’ve always said yes if we could. Meeting our winners is one of the best parts of working at the Iowa Lottery and we’ll celebrate wins of all sizes!

Justin says his sister asked him what he planned to do with “all that money.” He has some $5 ideas: maybe buy more lottery tickets, a cup of coffee (decaf, because that’s what he drinks), or a new fishing lure.

Justin considers today's prize-claim experience just a warm-up for much larger winnings to come. He says somebody’s going to win big, and it might as well be him!

Comments

[Mary Neubauer]

Here is a direct link to the page that provides the addresses for all of the Iowa Lottery's office locations. Prize claims by mail should be sent to the Lottery's location in Clive.

https://www.ialottery.com/Pages/AboutUs/LotteryOfficeLocations.aspx

[Andrew Decker]

Official mailing address?

[BEV JESTER]

THAT WAS A NICE THING TO DO FOR THE $5.00 WINNER, IOWA LOTTERY!