Amen to the last comment. I'd beat myself for the rest of my life if I found out I missed large jackpot like that.

  If they do find out..............

I'm sure they had a very good reason for not cashing it in.

I would be pretty upset or disappointed if I lost or had a winning lottery ticket and waited too long to cash it in.

 I want to do things with my life, that you need money in order to accomplish it! 

I doubt if they will ever find out.  Maybe they're not even alive.  I'm guessing that one of the reasons we read about these unclaimed tickets is purely statistics.  I don't know exactly how many people bought tickets for that draw, but take any heavily populated city like Chicago, Miami, New York, Los Angeles, etc.  Get the paper and read how many people die every week. 

There are a lot of threads about anonymity and not telling a soul you won. I've already told my sister,  in case of emergency or death, to look on my desk for a possible winning lottery ticket. You could buy a ticket and then get into an accident the next day.  

But on a lighter note, chances are many people who buy tickets just look at the numbers on TV or read the news and figure "I didn't win" because they don't understand there are lower tier prizes in addition to the jackpot, the same way people throw winning scratchers away.  They really don't understand the game. 

Another thingis it could have been a QP and the person just lost the ticket. I played 999 midday for this whole week in Ky but somehow I got the ticket mixed in with some other tickets which were for only 1 draw and threw it out. I now hope 999 doesn't fall this week because the Garbage truck has come and gone and I am not going out to play it again until next week. So far so good, 3 draws down and 3  left to go. This is the 1st time I did this. Once before my wife didn't check my pants and washed some lottery tickets, but of course they weren't winners. I was begging and pleading before the draw they wouldn't draw my numbers, lol.

justxploring's idea may not explain this particular incident, but death has to account for some of the unclaimed tickets.  Figuring that anyone who buys a ticket is at least 18 and has a life expectancy of 78, 1 of every 60 players will die this year. If the typical winner waits 2 weeks between finding out they've won and filing their claim about 1 out of every 1500 winners will die before cashing in the ticket. For the ones who don't tell anybody about their win, there's a fair chance that the ticket wil die with them. As often as we hear about unclaimed prizes I expect that far more tickets are lost , misplaced or never checked, but a few have to be because the winner died and nobody else knew to check the ticket. FWIW, that could be one reason to not sign your ticket, depending on who might  cash it in. If you sign it and then die it becomes part of your estate, so after losing the income tax somebody could also lose the estate tax on it.

As far as winners who simply forget  to check their tickets, I can (almost) understand it for people who buy a ticket on awhim, but I suspect that most of those people don't take the powerplay option, as was the case for this ticket.

I would have                     

KY Floyd writes:  FWIW, that could be one reason to not sign your ticket, depending on who might  cash it in. If you sign it and then die it becomes part of your estate, so after losing the income tax somebody could also lose the estate tax on it.

That's a good point.  I thought of that too when I was posting earlier.  So this is another reason to call an attorney as soon as possible.  I always check my tickets right away, but anything can happen, not just between the time you purchase a ticket and look up the numbers, but also after you win.  When people have a lot of things on their minds is when they often become forgetful or careless.