Sioux City Man Wins $25,000 Lottery Prize
Ramon Puente Claims Top Prize in 'Wild Bingo' Game
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CLIVE, Iowa — A Sioux City man has won a $25,000 lottery prize.
Ramon Puente, 21, won the 21st top prize in the Iowa Lottery's "Wild Bingo" scratch game. He purchased his winning ticket at Casey's, 524 11th St. in Correctionville, where he stopped on a trip to Ames to help his girlfriend move.
"It's kind of a thing of hers and I. We buy the $2 Bingo lottery tickets and we just scratch them off kind of as a little date thing," Puente told officials on Tuesday as he claimed his prize at the lottery's Storm Lake regional office. "It wasn't different than any other time."
Puente thought he'd won $500 until his girlfriend checked the ticket with the Iowa Lottery's mobile app.
"She's like, 'Umm, you just won $25,000!'" he recalled. "We just kind of freaked out for about 10 minutes and then we finally calmed down."
He said they double-checked the numbers and scanned the ticket again, then took it to a nearby store to check, just to be sure.
"It was kind of a shock, like, 'This can't be right,'" said Puente, who plans to put his winnings toward paying for college.
Wild Bingo is a $2 scratch game that features 45 top prizes of $25,000 and overall odds of 1 in 3.34. For more information about this game, and the number of prizes still available, visit www.ialottery.com.
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