Canada Lottery spokesperson Chris Fairclough talks about the Lotto Max claim. Video: Global News

After more than 11 months, the ticket holder for a $50 million lottery jackpot has turned in their ticket. Less than a week was left for the Lotto Max winner to claim.

Officials for the Canadian lottery game still have to verify to make sure the winner is genuine, but they took the rare step yesterday, March 9, of announcing the find in a press release.

The Province newspaper made the missing prize a front page story in 2014.

"We don’t usually make this step in public," said B.C. Lottery Corp. spokesman Chris Fairclough. "But because of the scrutiny and because it was expiring so soon, we decided to make this public now."

Hundreds of phone calls had poured into BCLC’s Kamloops call centre from hopeful winners who think they could have purchased - then lost - the winning ticket.

In 2013, the Ontario Lottery Corporation went to great lengths to find the winner of $50 million that had gone unclaimed for a year. They used CCTV to locate a happy Kathryn Jones.

BCLC had no explanation for the winner scraping in through the narrow timeframe. The ticket was due to expire in exactly one year.

But what made it worse was the interest the potential winner had lost by waiting this long.

To date, the ticket-holder has forfeited roughly $900,000 in interest, or $2,500 a day, said BCLC.

The winner could have bought this Porsche 918 Spyder with the interest.

The ticket-holder also set a B.C. record in being the closest winner to claim a major prize with only five days left until the expiry date.

And the million-dollar question — why did the ticket-holder wait so long to come forward? — still remains unanswered.

PHOTO: Arlen Redekop/Vancouver Province

Fairclough says he does not know why the person in question held on to their ticket for this long.

"I can say during my time at BCLC, this is the longest I have ever seen anyone wait to claim a prize," he says.

The next step for BCLC is to go through the winner verification process to ensure they are paying out the winnings to the rightful ticketholder.

BCLC said the winning ticket — numbers 3, 4, 5, 7, 31, 33, 40 and a bonus of 49 — was purchased in Langley.

LOST PRIZES: In B.C. about $75 million of winnings went unclaimed between 2002 and 2013, mostly for $10. Five major jackpots totalling more than $608,000 have expired since 2006, with the largest worth $196,201.70 from 2013.

The largest unclaimed expired prize in Canada was a $14.9-million Lotto 6/49 prize in 2006 in Alberta.