After 1st gift swiped in white elephant exchange, Louisville woman ends up with $175K lottery ticket

LOUISVILLE, Kentucky (WLKY) -- Ever played the white elephant gift exchange game?

Imagine someone swipes your gift worth $25, and you end up with $175,000. That's exactly what happened to a woman in Louisville.

According to the Kentucky Lottery, Lori Janes works at Harmon Dental Center as the office manager and treatment coordinator. She was at her company holiday party on Tuesday where they did a white elephant gift exchange where people have the opportunity to "steal" other people's gifts if they unwrap something they like, forcing that person to pick a new, wrapped gift.

Janes picked a $25 TJ Maxx gift card.

She said she was disappointed when it got stolen, but chose another gift that had $25 worth of scratch-off lottery tickets.

“Once it got to me, it was done and mine to keep. That’s when everyone was telling me to scratch them off,” Janes said.

She won $50 on the first ticket, then, when she scratched off the $10 Hit The Jackpot ticket, she won the game’s $175,000 top prize.

"Everyone was going insane. People were getting their calculators out and double-checking. A couple of people even scanned the ticket on the lottery’s app, just to make sure," Janes said.

Lottery officials said Janes called her husband and kids to share the news, but they had a hard time believing her at first.

“We figured she didn’t look at it right, but then we heard people in the background celebrating, it became real,” her husband told lottery officials.

Janes, along with her husband and two children, showed up at lottery headquarters just hours later at got a check for $124,250, after taxes.

"This is so crazy. I’m truly blessed," she said.

Janes told lottery officials they will pay off her daughter’s student loans and their cars.

Sunrise Market in Fisherville, where the winning scratch-off tickets were sold, will receive a $1,750 bonus.

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