Who owns the Lotto Max $40 million ticket that almost expired?
A terminal confirmed the ticket. It did not confirm the owner — and in Grey County, where the ticket was bought at a shop, the lottery corporation has no name to check against.
Clothing pockets, handbags, backpacks, wallets, laptop bags, glove compartments, sun visors, kitchen drawers, bedroom drawers, office drawers. For most of October that list was the whole search for an unclaimed Lotto Max ticket worth $40 million. The Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG) printed it in release after release, and asked anyone who had been in Grey County around the time of the draw to look in every place a small piece of paper hides.
The Lotto Max $40 million ticket turned up the way OLG’s releases said it might: validated at an authorized retailer’s lottery terminal, hours before it was due to expire at midnight on Wednesday, 28 October 2026. It had been bought for the draw of 28 October 2025, a year earlier, at a shop somewhere in Grey County, and the Lotto Max winning numbers were 06, 14, 17, 19, 26, 43 and 45, with bonus number 27. OLG’s Wednesday-afternoon release said the ticket “registered as the $40-million ticket.”
OLG said it had made contact with the person who validated the ticket, and that the next step was a meeting “in order to determine if they are the rightful owner(s) of the ticket.” A winner celebration, the corporation said, would be held if and when ownership is confirmed. Until then the name stays private, and the $40 million stays with the corporation. Tony Bitonti, OLG’s media relations coordinator, put the position plainly before the deadline: “this $40 million jackpot prize is not our money.” The money, he said, belongs to the person or persons who bought a ticket for a chance at it.
The corporation’s release described the ticket in detail and the buyer not at all. “OLG has very detailed information about this winning ticket,” it said. A ticket bought at a retailer carries no name. The terminal knows the paper. The hand that paid for it is a different question, and OLG answered it with the same sentence in every release: “As with all OLG prize claims of over $1,000, a review process is conducted to determine the rightful ownership of the ticket.”
The review already had work before the terminal sounded. OLG had received about 50 claims since it announced the unclaimed prize, Bitonti told INSAUGA Canada on 26 October, and those claims were being reviewed. “We may not be able to definitely say that it will be unclaimed on Oct. 28 as we would need to do the due diligence on the claims made prior to expiry,” he said. Earlier in October he had told Daily Hive that anyone trying to claim after the deadline would need “a really good reason” to still receive the winnings, and that each case would be decided on whether the claimant was the rightful owner. The validation on the 28th arrived into a queue that was already open.
What the person who validated the ticket must now produce is paperwork. OLG’s prize claim process requires a signed Lottery Prize Claim Declaration, witnessed by someone with no vested interest in the claim, and valid government-issued photo identification. The original signed ticket still has to be submitted to OLG by mail or courier, and a group claim needs a completed Group List. A ticket bought as a gift, or bought on someone else’s behalf, needs a Release of Prize Claim form signed by the purchaser, with that person’s identification too. A shop receipt from the validation helps. None of it proves a purchase on its own, and missing or incorrectly filled documents delay the claim until OLG contacts the claimant directly.
Scarborough is why the corporation is careful. A $70 million Lotto Max ticket bought there for the 28 June 2022 draw expired unclaimed. OLG’s own declaration of the loss, published in August 2023, records what happened in between: almost 2,700 individual claims, examined one by one by a dedicated team of lottery investigators, and not one of them successful. The physical ticket was never validated at a terminal, never checked at a self-serve checker, and never checked through the OLG App, before the deadline of 10:30 p.m. on 28 June 2023. The $70 million went back to the prize pool, for future bonus games and promotions in Lotto Max, Lotto 6/49 and Daily Grand. OLG’s advice after that case was four short instructions: sign the ticket as soon as it is bought, keep it somewhere safe and memorable, check it as soon as the draw is done, or buy on OLG.ca and be notified by email if it wins.
Eight days before the Grey County deadline, a ticket the system already knew won the record $90 million jackpot. A small group in the Calgary area won it in the draw of 20 October 2026, with a ticket bought through Play Alberta, the province’s online lottery site. The winning numbers were 8, 15, 19, 23, 26, 28 and 34, with bonus number 38, and it was the first $90 million jackpot ever won in Canada. Nobody had to appeal for that buyer. The purchase left a record with a name attached, and 13 Prairie tickets in the same draw shared more than $91.4 million in prizes.
The game itself changed while the Grey County ticket sat unchecked. An April 2026 enhancement raised the Lotto Max jackpot cap from $80 million to $90 million. The Grey County ticket belongs to the game as it was on 28 October 2025, when the draw that produced it was held, and its $40 million was the jackpot of that night. A $6 play now buys four selections of seven numbers from 1 to 52, with odds of 1 in 33,446,140 of winning the jackpot on a play.
People in the county had been doing what OLG asked long before the deadline. Halima Tu, writing on X on 30 October, asked the question the whole appeal had been circling: “But seriously, how do you forget to check a lottery ticket for almost a year?” Ryan Smith, commenting on Facebook, said the validation had “Saved me digging around looking tonight.” He added: “I’m not sure if I was working in Hanover at this time last year.” Hanover is one of the Grey County communities OLG named in its releases.
Ownership is the difference OLG’s review exists to draw, and the joke version of the ownership question arrived in the same Facebook thread as Ryan Smith’s comment. Tanya Lana Mari wrote: “those are my numbers!!!! i lost the ticket, dude must have found it!! i’m fair i’ll split it with him.” Read as a joke, it still names the exact gap in the story: the corporation can tell a real claim from a hopeful one, and validation alone settles nothing for the person who presented the paper.
Grey County, in OLG’s own description, takes in Owen Sound, Meaford, The Blue Mountains, Flesherton, Markdale, Durham and Hanover, in the Georgian Triangle. The corporation’s theory, repeated in its releases, was that a visitor might have bought the ticket and forgotten to check it after returning home, because the county is a popular destination for tourists and cottagers. That theory is also why the appeal went out across the province instead of staying local. The buyer of the Grey County Lotto Max ticket could have been anyone who passed through, and the ticket, once bought, kept no record of the passing.
OLG asks players to sign a ticket as soon as it is bought at a retail location. A ticket bought on OLG.ca works differently: the buyer is notified by email if the ticket has won a prize. The Grey County ticket was bought at a shop.
