How 110 people won big Powerball prizes in a 2005 drawing — without cheating – AOL

(NEXSTAR) – After a Powerball drawing on March 30, 2005, produced 110 winners of the game’s second-tier prize, lottery officials were immediately suspicious.

“Something was wrong; it was out of the realm of possibility,” Charles Strutt, the then-executive director of the Multi-State Lottery Association, told Reuters after the drawing. “So we suspected a great system error or a fraud.”

Officials with the Multi-State Lottery Association (MUSL) immediately launched an investigation, at least part of which focused on trying to match the winning numbers — 22-28-32-33-39, and the Powerball 42 — with any prominent birthdays or dates, the Associated Press reported at the time. Investigators even considered that the numbers may have been mentioned on a TV show (specifically “Lost”) before quickly ruling it out, according to Reuters.

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By the day after the drawing, lottery officials had learned that the winners weren’t cheating, and they didn’t get their numbers from any birthdays or TV shows. They were simply playing the numbers that came with their Chinese food.

“Many of the winners revealed they chose the winning numbers from a fortune cookie when they claimed their prize,” Anna Domoto, the communications director for MUSL, told Nexstar.

Winners that came forward in multiple states all provided the same explanation, a marketing director for MUSL told the AP. The cookies were eventually traced back to Wonton Foods, Inc., in Queens, New York, which had produced and distributed thousands of cookies with the same “lucky numbers” inside.

When reached after the drawing, Derrick Wong, the VP of sales at Wonton Foods, quickly confirmed the cookies had come from his factory, The New York Times reported in a 2005 investigation. The numbers on that particular fortune — like all the number combinations at the time — were picked randomly, one by one, from a bowl by a worker at the company, according to Wong.

“That’s very nice, 110 people won the lottery from the numbers,” Wong said, according to the Times.

The fortune cookies got one number wrong, however, which is why there were so many second-tier winners rather than jackpot winners: The slip inside the cookies listed a “40” where the Powerball would have been, while the winning Powerball number was a 42.

Still, the drawing produced one jackpot-winning ticket (with computer-generated numbers) worth the $25.2 million prize, sold in Tennessee. Additional payouts to the 110 second-tier winners totaled more than $19 million more. (Of the 110 second-tier winners, 89 were paid $100,000 each, and the remaining 21 — who opted for the $1 Power Play option — were paid $500,000 each.)

The MUSL dipped into a reserve fund to make sure all the winners were paid, according to the New York Times.

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To this day, the drawing on March 30, 2005, holds the record for producing the largest number of second-tier prize winners in Powerball history. But other drawings have come close, according to data provided by a MUSL: A drawing in January 2016 — the first with an advertised jackpot of over $1 billion — produced 81 second-tier winners, likely due to higher player participation and all five white balls having relatively low numbers, meaning better chances for players who picked their numbers based on birthdays or calendar dates.

Also very recently, a drawing on April 29, 2026, produced 89 second-tier winners, but for very different reasons than the drawings in 2005 or 2016. Powerball officials said the “unprecedented” wins were likely the result of ticketholders playing numbers that aligned in a row on their Powerball scan slips. On some of those slips — which players use to mark down the numbers they want on their tickets — the winning numbers for the April 29 drawing aligned perfectly in columns or diagonally.

Powerball officials again confirmed after the April drawing that all prizes would be paid in full. “Powerball maintains sufficient prize reserves to support million dollar payouts, even in drawings where the number of high tier winners significantly exceeds statistical expectations,” a recent news release explains.

But in a statement shared with Nexstar, Matt Strawn, the Powerball Product Group Chair and Iowa Lottery CEO, reminded players that all number combinations have the same chances of winning.

The April 29 drawing “shows that many players have unique ways of choosing their numbers — and there’s no wrong way to do it,” Strawn said. “Every number combination has the same probability of being drawn, whether players select their own numbers or let the terminal choose them at random.”

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