Man Owns 100,000 Lottery Tickets, Refuses to Scratch Them

Elise Solé
Corbis

A British man who has collected over 100,000 lottery cards could have been a millionaire - if he had ever bothered to cash them in. Dave Mannix, 42, says he owns the world's biggest scratch ticket collection, but he refuses to scratch them.

A former phone card collector who put his obsession to rest in 1990 with the rise of cell phones, Mannix says he's collected almost every scratch card issued by the U.K.'s National Lottery since 1994. Some of the cards are used, donated to him by various retailers and others he bought new. In fact, over the last 20 years, Mannix has spent $131,800 buying unscratched cards for his collection, which he lovingly stores in one room in his Cheshire home. 10,000 cards remain unscratched and most have expired past their 6-month cash-in date.

It's not difficult to imagine how Mannix's wife, Sue feels about her husband's hobby. "Every so often Sue looks at me angrily and asks me when am I going to get rid of them but she knows I've had a lot of fun collecting them," Mannix told the Daily Mail.

Surprisingly, Mannix doesn't work, due to a severe arthritis condition, making his missed opportunity for a potential windfall even more confusing. Nonetheless, Mannix has recently decided to part with his beloved cards and is selling his collection for a little more than $800,000 despite their estimated worth of 8,206,000. Mannix hopes the next owner will scratch off all the cards so he can finally discover how much money he could have won.

Mannix's resolve is undeniably impressive, but is behavior a sign of hoarding or that of a true collector?

"Collectors are typically people who have an emotional connection to the item - maybe their grandparents owned it or the item reminds them of an event from their childhood, or they collect for personal enjoyment," Angela Becker, President of the Antiques and Collectibles National Association, tells Yahoo Shine. "In general, most collectors are able to define what the item means to them and the pleasure they receive from owning it."

Mannix isn't the only one with superhuman will power. In September, a Canadian man named Steve Thurber stumbled on a 106-year-old bottle believed to contain a message from 1906. Despite historians calling the odds of such a find "astronomical," Thurber declined to open the bottle, calling his discovery, "unreal."