Cash 4 Life Winners
Find out about some of Cash4Life’s biggest winners right here. These lucky players matched all the numbers to win the game’s top prize. They could then choose between taking a multimillion-dollar cash option or payouts of $1,000 a day for life.
Robert Goldup (New York)
Robert Goldup from Schenectady can perhaps lay claim to be the biggest Cash4Life winner of all time. He decided to purchase multiple sets of numbers for the drawing, using the same five main numbers each time but a different Cash Ball. The result was that he won not just the top prize, but also three second prizes.
He decided to take the cash option - $7 million for the top prize, plus three lots of $1 million – which worked out as a one-time lump sum payment of $6.4 million after all the required withholdings. The ticket had been purchased at a Speedway at 1911 Curry Road in Rotterdam.
Anonymous (Maryland)
A military veteran turned federal agency worker, this Maryland player said that he would bring forward his retirement plans after landing Cash4Life’s top prize. He had bought his $10 Quick Pick ticket at Chadwick Liquors in Woodlawn and decided to stay anonymous, only calling himself ‘Lucky Winner’ in the press release.
He claimed his prize a month after the draw, before telling his wife, and revealed that he would let her decide on all the places where they could travel in future. He anticipated that they would relocate to a new home in Florida, while he also wanted to give 10 percent of his winnings to his church.
Pinkey Esmond LLC (New York)
This big prize went to an Albany-based winner, who formed a Limited Liability Company to effectively preserve their anonymity. They had purchased their ticket at Church Blue Sky Deli located at 2021 Church Ave. in Brooklyn.
The winner decided to take the cash rather than the annuity, leaving them with a one-time payment of $4.2 million after tax.
Anonymous (Maryland)
A woman from Frederick in Maryland, known only as Marie, became the state’s first Cash4Life jackpot winner after matching all the numbers in this drawing. It took her a week to realize she had won, when she took her ticket back to Weis Market to get it checked and a message came up to say she needed to take it to lottery headquarters.
When she got home, she told her husband that she had good news and bad news for him, saying: “I told him the bad news first - that I found out we had to pay to get his newly purchased truck inspected. Then I told him the good news - that we can easily afford that and much more.”
Anonymous (New Jersey)
This New Jersey man won the second prize of $1,000 a week for life just days after getting a message in a fortune cookie that suggested his luck was about to turn. He told lottery officials that the slip of paper inside the cookie had said ‘Believe in Miracles’, and it was the first thing he remembered when he found out that he had won.
The lucky winner, who was allowed to stay anonymous under New Jersey law, had played Cash4Life via a courier service, meaning that he just picked his numbers via an app and the ticket was bought for him. He said the money would help him with his retirement planning.