A MYSTERY woman who won a $12 million lottery prize in 1992 has finally revealed herself.

Janet Valenti, 77, claims that she picked up the winning lottery ticket on July 17, 1991, at a deli in Staten Island, New York, about 15 minutes outside of Manhattan.

The winning numbers were 2, 3, 6, 43, 46 and 52.

Valenti should’ve walked away with $12 million prize but failed to cash in her lucky ticket.

According to the media outlet, Valenti placed the ticket on an end table – with a pile of other lotto tickets she had already checked – near a couch in her home.

She threw the pile of tickets away right before she went on a trip to Upstate New York with her teenage daughters and mother.

Valenti, who is a retired Department of Education worker, told SI Live: “It was a comedy of errors.”

“It went in the garbage.”

When Valenti came home from her trip, a friend of hers told her that someone from Staten Island won the $12 million prize.

She checked the winning numbers, and recognized them immediately, as she plays the same numbers all the time, which are all of personal significance to her.

“Those are my numbers,” she told her friend.

However, the ticket was already in the garbage – and it had already been hauled off by the sanitation department.

“My next-door neighbor, who has never in her life, the whole time I lived there, ever put my garbage out for collection, she did,” Valenti said.

Read Related Also: I put a billboard up that sparked a severe response from my HOA, it was ‘my only recourse’ & I was willing to go to jail

“That was the end of it,” Valenti she added.

“Who thought anything of going to the dump at that particular time?”

Valenti said she contacted lawyers about the trashed ticket, but they told her the winning ticket is required in hand to claim the prize.

There was nothing she could do about it.

Video footage from the deli proving that she purchased the ticket wouldn’t even help, she said.

“It didn’t make a difference,” she said. “There was nothing I could do.”

Per New York lottery rules, the winning ticket would’ve expired on July 17, 1992 – exactly one year after Valenti purchased it.

It was the largest unclaimed lottery prize in New York history at the time.

Valenti was a single mom of two teenagers when she lost out on the money.

Hearing about all the lottery curses over the years has helped her come to terms with the loss.

“Given that kind of money, things can go bad,” Valenti said.

“That was a saving grace. Who knows what would have happened if I’d had that money? You read these stories, a lot of people win Lotto, they drop dead. Maybe it was [her husband] looking out for us to not have that kind of money.”

Valenti still plays the lottery today.

“The most I ever get is a free play or a couple of dollars,” she said.