Woman Wins $175K at Office Gift Exchange

A Kentucky woman was disappointed when somebody "stole" a $25 TJ Maxx gift card from her during a holiday party gift exchange game, but she ended up with a gift worth 7,000 times more. Lori Janes, an office manager at a dental center in Louisville, chose $25 in scratch-off lottery tickets at the white elephant gift exchange, People reports. Janes's colleagues urged her to scratch them off immediately and two of them paid off. She won $50 on the first ticket she tried. On the next, a $10 "Hit the Jackpot" ticket, she hit all 15 spots, winning the $175,000 top prize, reports WAVE3.

"Everyone was going insane," Janes says, per the Kentucky Lottery. "People were getting their calculators out and double checking. A couple of people even scanned the ticket on the lottery's app, just to make sure." Janes says she called her family to tell them about the win but they initially didn't believe her. "We figured she didn’t look at it right, but then we heard people in the background celebrating, it became real," her husband says. The win came to $124,250 after tax. Janes says the money will go toward paying off auto loans and her daughter's student loans. (More uplifting news stories.)