Powerball Jackpot Up To $60 Million, Florida Mystery Winner Appears In Store Video

The Powerball jackpot will rise to $60 million for Saturday’s drawing, while in southwest Florida, the winner of a $148.8 million jackpot — the largest lottery prize ever won in that region of the country — remained underground.

But the store where he bought the winning ticket for the April 23 Powerball drawing released its in-store security video, giving the world a brief first look at its newest nine-digit multimillionaire. The tiny E’s Country Store, the small convenience store where the man purchased his ticket, released video showing the winner only from the back, to protect his privacy.

If the man in the video capture above chooses to take his Powerball winnings a single payment, he’ll receive approximately $87.6 million before taxes. The good news is, Florida does not collect state taxes on lottery winnings, so once this gentleman pays off Uncle Sam to the tune of about $22 million, the rest is his to enjoy as he sees fit.

Store employees said that the man is a regular customer, but he has not returned to the shop since the day after the Powerball drawing, when he checked his ticket and learned he was the jackpot winner.

As for Wednesday night’s drawing, while the Powerball numbers did not yield a jackpot winner, they did create three new millionaires, as one ticket each in California, Vermont and New Jersey matched the first five numbers, but not the Powerball.

Well, to be accurate, of those three second prize Powerball winners, only two will become millionaires. While in 42 of the 43 Powerball states, the second prize is an even $1 million, California pays out lower-tier prizes on a pari-mutuel basis, meaning prizes are dependent on the amount of money spent by players on a specific drawing.

The California winner will collect only $442,609 before taxes. Meanwhile, the New Jersey “Match 5” winner paid an extra dollar to activate the Power Play option, meaning that person’s ticket is good for a $2 million prize.

In total, there were 345,536 winning tickets out of just 11,555,819 sold. That is the lowest number of Powerball tickets sold for a single drawing since October 10 of 2012, the last time Powerball ticket sales failed to top 12 million.

But your ticket might have been one of them. Check your numbers against the winning Powerball numbers drawn at 10:59 pm in Tallahassee, Florida.

2 — 9 — 11 — 19 — 50 Powerball 32

A total of $6,882,854 in prize money was won in Wednesday’s Powerball drawing.