$8m lottery Powerball jackpot up for grabs

Powerball is at $8 million tonight – and it comes a fortnight after the second biggest lotto prize in history was snatched up by two lucky ticket holders.

There’s an $8 million lottery prize up for grabs after nobody picked the right numbers for last week’s base prize of $3 million.

As a result, the cash has more than doubled to Thursday night’s offering of $8 million.

Last year, 14 Powerball winners across Australia pocketed more than $550 million in prize money.

Of those wins, seven landed in NSW, four in Queensland, two in Victoria and one in Western Australia.

Thursday’s $8 million prize comes exactly a fortnight after a historic $126 million Powerball was snatched up by two ticket holders, one from Western Australia and one from Victoria.

But in a major twist, the $63 million fortune – split between the ticket holders – didn’t belong to one person in Western Australia, but rather 250 players who bought their tickets through a syndicate.

There’s $8 million up for grabs.

The syndicate from the town of Kalgoorlie scored the huge prize.

It was formed through a local Facebook group called ‘Goldfields, let’s pay our mortgages’.

Each person in the syndicate won about $260,000.

The newsagent that sold the winning ticket posted, then deleted, a hilarious Facebook update, simple saying: “We f***ing did it.”

The division one prize pool was boosted to a phenomenal $126,618,113.96 due to the number of entries purchased in the draw.

The NSW entry was purchased from a NSW Lotteries outlet in the Coffs Harbour region, officials said in a statement.

In addition to the two division one winners, there were 36 division two winners who shared more than $2.7 million, receiving $77,385.90 each.

Two weeks ago, two tickets nabbed a $126 million prize.

Last month’s $120 million Powerball draw was the second-biggest prize ever offered by an Australian lottery game.

It’s only surpassed by a $150 million Powerball draw held in September 2019. However, three individuals shared that prize.

Also in 2019, a Sydney nurse became Australia’s current biggest individual lottery winner when she won a phenomenal $107,575,649.08.

Since her 2019 win, the cashed-up woman and her family have bought a new home and made some donations – but she still works.