A guy bought a lottery ticket for $10.

A guy bought a lottery ticket for $10. It turned out to be a winning ticket worth $12.8 million. Now his employer is suing to take it from him. The crazy part is just following the rules that they gave him. So here's the story. Last November, a woman walked into a Circle K in Arizona and asked the clerk to print some lottery tickets. She wanted 85 tickets for Arizona's big lottery game called the Pick. The clerk printed them. But when the woman went to pay, she only had $60 on her. So she paid for 60 and left 25 of them sitting there on the counter. That night they ran the drawings and one of those tickets, one of the 25 she left on the counter, hit all six numbers. Like that, it was worth $12.8 million. $12,800,000. The next morning, the store manager, a guy named Robert Galitzka, came in for a shift, just like he had done for the past 20 years. And he found out that the winning ticket had been sold at his store the night before and never claimed. So he dug through the leftover tickets behind the register. And sure enough, there it was. Now what he did next is either completely by the books or a scheme, depending on who you ask. Robert clocked out, he took off his Circle K uniform, and then he had another employee sell him the leftover tickets, the winning ticket included for $10. So why did he take off his uniform? Well, it's because Arizona has a rule. Sellers of lottery tickets aren't allowed to buy tickets while they're working. They're working. The store can lose its license over that. So clocking out and changing clothes in his mind, doing it by the books. Now his plan was to split the $12.8 million with his coworker. But Circle K found out and they took the ticket, locked it in a safe at corporate headquarters, fired him and took him to court to keep the prize for themselves. Now you might be thinking this sounds outrageous. What gives them the right to do that? Well, Circle K's argument is based on a rule buried inside Arizona's lottery code. If a store prints a ticket, the customer refuses it, and the store doesn't resell it, then the store owns it. So by their logic, when the original customer refused to pay for the ticket, it belonged to the store. But Robert's side just filed their response and he has a strong case of his own. He said Circle K had a standing policy that when a customer prints a ticket and doesn't pay, employees are required themselves out of their own pocket because a printed ticket can't be voided after the fact. He even gathered six sworn statements from current and former employees backing him up. In his view, buying the ticket wasn't some sort of scheme, it was him simply following the rules of his job. It was the thing the company made him do for years. He claims the only difference this time is that the ticket was worth almost $13 million. It's a rounding error. So we'll see. None of this, the ticket is still sitting in a safe and the money hasn't been paid to anyone. So here's my question for you. Forget what's legal for a second. Who do you think should get the money? The manager who followed the policy, the company that owns the store, or the stranger who left it behind? Let me know in the comments and follow for more stories like these.