Reality TV series leads Washington woman to $250,000 lottery prize

March 7 (UPI) -- A Washington woman said analyzing the habits of lottery winners from a reality TV show led to her winning her own $250,000 prize.

Spokane resident Shannon Fernandez told Washington's Lottery officials she is an avid follower of the HGTV reality show My Lottery Dream Home, and she started paying attention to the stories of the winners featured in the series.

"The show just happens to profile a lot of people who win playing $10 scratch games, so I figured that should be the type of ticket I buy," Fernandez said. "There was a sparkly new $10 ticket that caught my eye, and that's the one I bought. Turned out I picked right!"

Fernandez selected a pair of Diamond Crossword tickets from a lottery vending machine at Walmart on North Colton Street in Spokane.

"At first, I counted 10 complete words, which is $1,000 prize and that's pretty cool since the most I'd ever won before is maybe $150," Fernandez said. "Then I kept looking and found an eleventh word, which meant a $5,000 prize. I was so excited that I called my husband, and we planned to celebrate later that night with a nice dinner."

She said it wasn't until a clerk at her local Safeway store scanned the ticket that she discovered she had missed some words and had actually won a $250,000 prize.

"He didn't actually say the amount out loud," the player said. "I just put the ticket and slip in my purse and drove off. It wasn't until I got to the mall and walked into the lottery store that I looked at the slip and nearly fainted when I saw that it said $250,000 on it. I guess that twelfth word was somewhere on the ticket after all!"

Fernandez said she and her husband were already in the market for a new house, and the big prize will allow her to buy a "dream home" of her own.