Salisbury woman wins $100,000 on a $30 scratch-off and plans to open her own hair salon

Lori Latham of Salisbury won a $100,000 top prize on a $30 $100,000 Cash Payday scratch-off and wants to use it to open a business. “I would like to start my own hair salon,” she told the North Carolina Education Lottery.

She bought the ticket at Mid-Town Dixie Express Fuel on West Salisbury Street in Asheboro. “My eyes like lit up when I saw it,” Latham said. Her first move was to call her mother. “She said, ‘What’s wrong,’ and I said, ‘Nothing but please come here,’” she recalled. Latham claimed the prize at lottery headquarters in Raleigh on Monday and took home $72,018 after required state and federal tax withholding.

$100,000 Cash Payday launched March 3 with 80 top prizes, and 53 are still unclaimed, the lottery said. About 34.5% of its roughly 6.1 million tickets have sold, so the top prizes have gone at about the same pace as the tickets. A ticket bought now has about a 1 in 76,000 chance at one of them, almost the same as on launch day. Seven of its ten $30,000 prizes are also left. In July, a Gastonia woman won one on the first scratch-off she ever bought, and WECT reported a Wilmington winner in August.

The game returns 77.9% of sales as prizes, a little under the 79.9% average for North Carolina's ten $30 tickets, and it rates 79.5 on our ValueScore™, third among them. Lottery funds sent $7.7 million to education programs in Rowan County last year, the lottery said.

Sources

North Carolina Education Lottery: Rowan County woman plans to start a hair salon with $100,000 win

WECT: Wilmington man's $30 scratch-off pays out $100,000 top prize

North Carolina Education Lottery: Scratch-off prizes remaining