A scratch card participant, begging for change, wins half a million in Pesaro but can't claim it due to a lack of residency permits

Imagine winning the lottery and not being allowed to cash the check. That’s what happened to Imagbe Ehizomwengie, a 36-year-old Nigerian man living in Turin, Italy. According to the Guardian, which first reported his story, Ehizomwengie used money he had earned selling handkerchiefs and begging outside a supermarket to buy a €5 Gratta e Vinci, Italy’s version of a scratch-off lottery ticket, last October. He scratched it off and discovered he had won €500,000. He wept tears of joy and relief, only to find that the celebration was a little premature.

Why a lottery win could not fix his legal status
This is the twist that Americans might have a hard time understanding. Ehizomwengie did not have a bank account, and Italian law demanded one to collect his winnings. He had no bank account because he had no residency permit. Without money in his pocket to show he could support himself, he could not strengthen his case for the permit. It was a bureaucratic circle with no apparent way out.

Ehizomwengie arrived in Italy in 2016 after crossing the Sahara and the Mediterranean. He spent two years in captivity in Libya until a ransom was paid to free him. Once he arrived in Italy, he applied for “special protection,” a legal status for people who don’t qualify to be considered refugees but who would be at serious risk if sent back to their home country. His application was rejected. Without the right to work, he got by selling things on the street, sometimes gambling on scratch cards for a change of luck.

That denial did not happen in a vacuum. According to JURIST, Human Rights Watch warned that Italy's 2023 Cutro decree would make it much harder for migrants to obtain special protection status, and that blocking the ability to convert that status into a work permit could push more people into undocumented life. The law also extended detention pending deportation from 120 to 135 days and created a new border procedure that can hold asylum seekers for up to four weeks while their claims are processed. HRW said the package would also strip first reception centers of psychosocial assistance, legal information, and language courses, making the system harsher well beyond the special-protection rules

Separately, according to the Asylum Information Database, a research project run by the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, the 2023 law eliminated the right to private and family life as a valid ground for special protection, and monitoring by the Italian legal group ASGI found this change has already narrowed the number of cases in which protection is granted. For someone like Ehizomwengie, already living on the margins, that policy shift closed a door just as he needed it open.

A friend, a cousin, and a shop called Mama Africa
Unable to open an account himself, Ehizomwengie handed his winnings over to a fellow Nigerian he considered a friend, trusting he would keep his money safe. The trust was ill-placed. The friend started to treat the money as his own, and it took the local Nigerian community and Ehizomwengie’s cousin to sort things out. A few months later, about half of his post-tax winnings, roughly €250,000, were moved into his cousin's account.

With that money, Ehizomwengie bought Mama Africa, a small shop of African groceries in Falconara, a seaside town in Italy’s Marche region.

The permit meant more than the money
His lawyer, Andrea Palazzeschi, brought the case before a tribunal in Ancona. This week, the court ruled in favor of Ehizomwengie and ordered that he be given a residency permit. The judges said it was his fluent Italian, his work at the shop, and his new financial independence, rather than the lottery win itself, that turned the tide.

"It's important to stress that Imagbe didn't get the residence permit because he won the money; he got it because he proved to be a good candidate," Palazzeschi said.

For Ehizomwengie, the ruling stung more than the jackpot ever did. “Receiving the permit means more to me than winning the money," he said. "I want to work and contribute to society."

Long odds, and not the first close call
Winning big on a Gratta e Vinci is rare. The average odds of winning any prize on a scratch card are about 1 in 3.6, with most of those wins being small, according to Italy’s official gambling regulator, the Agenzia delle Dogane e dei Monopoli. Ehizomwengie's tale isn't even the weirdest in recent game history. In 2019, a jobless fisherman in Puglia found a winning scratch card worth €100,000 in a rubbish bin and was able to claim his prize. A young man in northern Italy won €500,000 in 2022 and fainted instantly from the shock.

A small-town celebration ahead
Word of Ehizomwengie's win, and his win against the system, has spread through Falconara. He’s planning a party open to the whole town, though he’s quick to explain what it’s really for. "I want to work and intend to keep my feet firmly on the ground. I just want to live a normal life," he said.

It is a strange kind of American Dream story, playing out an ocean away, where the real jackpot was never the cash. It was the paperwork.