A Welsh mum might still walk away with her £12,000,000 lottery jackpot after a shop assistant threw her ticket away.

Kath Main, 46, had played her usual lucky numbers on Saturday, June 6, which turned out to be the winners for that National Lottery draw.

However, when her mum Fiona went to the Londis in Abercynon, she was told they had not won, and the owner chucked the ticket away.

It wasn’t until they saw the winning numbers laid out in the paper with a note saying the jackpot was scooped up in the area of Rhondda Cynon Taf that they realised the error.

Kath told The Sun her winning numbers – 8,10, 26, 30, 35, and 42 – are based on her and husband Marcus’ birthdays, her and Marcus’ age when they started playing, and two random numbers ‘to make it up to six’.

Without her winning ticket, the rugby club secretary must wait until December 3 to claim the cash – assuming nobody else comes forward.

Kath said she ‘feels sick all the time’ waiting for the payout, having planned to spend some of the money on a Lions rugby tour in New Zealand.

Shop owner Karan Kumar said: ‘The woman came in to check the numbers and there was no beep on the machine, nothing came up on the screen, so we just binned them.’

Lottery play at the South Wales Londis is now suspended but Karan added it would ‘be amazing if [Kath] won.’

A spokesperson for Allwyn, operator of The National Lottery, said: ‘We are the only major lottery which is able to look to pay a winner even if they have lost their ticket.

‘The investigation we conduct is designed to ensure any claim is from the rightful ticketholder.

‘We are then able, at our discretion, to pay that player once the claim period has expired 180 days after the draw.

‘We are proud to pay out millions of prizes as well as raising over £33M for Good Causes each week.’

Kath is slightly more fortunate than an anonymous player in Italy who won €1,000,000 but chucked his ticket thinking it was worthless.

The poor guy then tracked down the waste lorry that had taken it to a dump where workers managed to find it agter two days of trawling through rubbish.

The shop in the southern Italian region of Puglia, where the player had originally bought the ticket, had told him it was ‘non-payable’.

While they believed that to mean he hadn’t won a prize this time, it actually meant his winnings were too large to be processed by the shop.

Luck seemed to be on his side, though, as the workers found the ticket and then landed £50 on a scratchcard for themselves too.

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