April 24, 2020 / By mobanmarket
URBANDALE, IA — It’s game over for most people who play scratch lottery games and score a $1 win. They usually just reinvest the prize money in hopes of a bigger win. But not Tyler Heep of Urbandale, Iowa, is having millions of dollars worth of fun with his prize.
He took his winning $1 ticket down to Iowa Lottery headquarters in Clive in early January and asked for one of those big ceremonial checks. Everyone had a big laugh, Mary Neubauer, the Lottery’s media specialist, told Patch.
Heep posted the photo on his Facebook page on Jan. 4, and as the the month draws to a close, he’s a bona fide internet hero. The photo of a smiling Heep holding that enormous check for $1 has been picked up across the country, as well as The Daily Mail in London.
“It cracks me up how far this went,” Neubauer said.
One curiosity on the check is the notation on the memo line. It says “Stinking Rich” — which is both hilarious from the standpoint that the check won’t even buy a cup of coffee at most places, but also is the name of the scratch game that Heep won.
He spent his winnings at a local convenience store and got a little more than a half gallon of gas, he wrote on Facebook.
Neubauer said Lottery officials don’t know if the cost of the big check was more than the prize, but they’re not concerned about it. They’re printed in bulk, just like the tinier checks in personal checkbooks.
“We haven’t gone back to do the financial analysis,” she said. “From our perspective, here was someone who wanted to have fun with that situation, and we were all in.”
Heep told television station WHO that Lottery officials gave him the same white-glove treatment extended to winners of bigger prizes.
“They decided to treat me like a million dollar winner,” he told the news station. “The guy came down the stairs and they took me into the back room where the camera was with the Iowa Lottery logo. Sure enough they wrote me the one dollar check and had me hold it up and took the picture.”
And now that his celebrity has grown, Benjamin’s Custom Framing and Fine Art in Mississippi has offered to frame his check.
Patch has reached out to Heep for comment. We’ll update this post if we hear back from him.
Photo via Iowa Lottery
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