Winner plans to buy house with NC lottery top prize. ‘We really needed this’

A North Carolina woman scratched off a $5 lottery ticket in her truck, and then her life changed, she said.

“It just didn’t seem real,” Chasta Buff said, according to a Sept. 25 news release from the NC Education Lottery. “It still doesn’t.”

Buff said it hit her that she was looking at a top prize of $200,000. She immediately walked back into Vale Mart & Hardware, where she bought the ticket Sept. 21, and confirmed her win.

The winning $5 ticket came from a new game that debuted in August called Mega Bucks. It had nine total $200,000 prizes, with seven top prizes still to be claimed.

Buff told lottery officials she knows exactly how she’s going to use her win.

With the $143,001 she earned after tax withholding, Buff plans on looking into buying a house, she said.

“For us, this is life-changing,” she said. “We really needed this.”

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