Perfect Timing For Deserving $250,000 Winner

A Korean immigrant whose wife is about to give birth to the couple's first child has claimed the $250,000 Kachingo! monthly draw prize for January.

To make things even more timely, the night before he found out about the win the husband had applied for a student loan to study at Unitech to improve his business skills.

The winner received his lucky Kachingo! ticket from the BP service station on the corner of Blockhouse Bay and Tiverton Roads in west Auckland on Monday January 21.

The game lines he received just for doing his shopping won the couple the big cash monthly draw on Sunday, February 3.

The couple found out about its good fortune after the service station proprietor told them one of his customers had been issued with the winning ticket.

They drove home immediately and the wife checked their Kachingo! tickets.

"On the way home I asked my wife if she thought the government would still give me the student loan if we had $250,000 in our bank account. She said she didn't think so," the husband said.

"We've been collecting Kachingo! tickets for a while and keep them in a drawer and check them all the time but this ticket slipped to the side and we did not check it at first," he said.

The couple has been in New Zealand for only two years.

"I was in New Zealand in 1994 as exchange worker for a year and I thought it would be a good country to live in - perhaps it was a premonition; it has been a good choice for us."

First priority for the couple is to pay off the mortgage on their house.

"Everything is just perfect - perfect timing with the baby coming along. And I have withdrawn my application for a student loan," the husband said.

BP spokesperson Jane Diver said all winning stories were great but this one was special.

"The family is making a new start in a new country, and they have their first baby on the way and it just gives their Kachingo! win even more poignancy," Ms Diver said.

Kachingo! spokesperson Chris Berryman says it is special to witness the handing over of a $250,000 cheque to such a deserving couple.

"All the work we've done, the six years we've spent developing the scheme and millions of dollars we've poured into all seem very worthwhile when you see what a difference it can make," he said.

It is the third of four Kachingo! monthly draws to be claimed since the rewards scheme was officially launched last October.

The winner of the Kachingo! November draw worth $1 million is still to come forward. Whoever it is shopped at Woolworths in the Auckland inner suburb of Grey Lynn on Tuesday, November 13.

A Wanganui father of four won $250,000 in the Kachingo! October draw and the December $250,000 draw was won by a couple from Otaki on the west coast of the North Island near Levin.

It is just 14 months since Kachingo! was launched with Super Liquor as its initial retail partner. Woolworths supermarkets, BP and KFC joined the programme in October this year.

About Kachingo!

Kachingo! is a customer rewards programme invented in New Zealand. It is the only one to reward shoppers with Big Cash prizes and instant rewards just for shopping at any store within the Kachingo! village of partners. The village consists of BP, KFC (north of the Bombay Hills), Super Liquor and Woolworths, Big Fresh and Price Chopper supermarkets.

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