Daughter accidently wins father over half a million dollars
On behalf of her disabled father, Amber Galligan placed the three dollar bet on the weekly Scoop6, which involved picking the winners of six televised races.
Amber's father Thomas who has arthritis, sent his daughter down to the shops to place the bet but he never thought he had won as one of the horses he'd picked was a non-runner.
Little did Thomas know that the scratched horse was automatically switched to the unnamed favourite of the race.
Amber also didn't stick to the instructions of her father.
'I had initially written the bet out on the wrong slip for the Jackpot and the lad behind the counter put it on the Scoop6 slip for me and copied over my numbers.
'My dad doesn't know how he picked Dandy Boy at 33-1 in the last leg, but it must have been a slip of the pen and I also put the number 18 in the second leg in and there were only 16 in the race, so that went on the winning favourite,' Amber told the Mail Online.
A nationwide appeal was launched to try and find the winner of the $603,592.84 ticket. It was the first time in the pool bet's 13 year history that a winner has failed to come forward to collect a major prize.
In the meantime Amber returned to the BetFred shop to put another bet on and it was then that her fortune was discovered.
'I was at the counter when the assistant told me they'd been looking for me and I knew he wasn't joking as he was so deadly serious.
'When he first told me that the bet had won I thought it was the place part and might have been a few hundred pounds, not hundreds of thousands of pounds,' Amber told the Mail Online.
Thomas, a former builder’s labourer who has been riddled with arthritis for years was over the moon with the surprise win.
'Our first priority with the win will be to buy a bigger place to live and I also want to take them all on the holiday of a lifetime. We don't really do holidays as we have just enough to get by, so I can't remember the last time we went on one if ever' Thomas told the Mail Online.