She’s no prize.
The wife of a Long Island doctor nearly cost her husband $6.2 million when she hung up on a Lotto official calling with news he had won the jackpot.
Tammy Schwartz-Strobel, 52, said she thought the female caller — who told her they had won big — was trying to scam her, she said on Thursday.
“I listened for a couple of minutes and then I said, ‘I’m hanging up,’ and I hung up,” said Schwartz-Strobel, 52, whose husband, Alan Strobel, 53, bought the winning ticket drawn on Nov. 6 .
“They called back two more times, and I let the answering machine answer. The third time, I couldn’t take it, I said, ‘You can’t have my husband’s number!’ ” she said.
Eventually she agreed to e-mail the caller’s phone number to her hubby, an anesthesiologist from Jericho, who was working at the time.
He didn’t believe it, either. “You have to understand, we never had any expectation of getting a call like this,” said Strobel, who bought the ticket using a Lotto subscription.
“I did my own research and confirmed they were real before calling anyone back,” he said.
The caller turned out to be Mary Kay Derby, a director of Lotto prize payments — who promised she wasn’t a con artist. “I told him, ‘Your subscription won.’ He said, ‘I can’t believe this. This is not something I was expecting,’ ” Derby told the Post. “He said, ‘What kind of money are we talking about here?’ I said: ‘A lot.’ ”
The doctor chose the winning six numbers using a combination of birthdays and anniversary dates that he had been playing for years.
Despite his wife’s nearly catastrophic financial flub, he nevertheless “gifted” his money to her, who claimed the cash on Thursday, taking home a one-time lump sum payment of $3.9 million.
She was one of seven New Yorkers announced on Thursday, who won a total of $16.3 million.
“I still don’t believe it. It’s still amazing,” Schwartz-Strobel said.
She said she now plans to buy her husband a gift. “Maybe a nice car. A Maserati?” she said.
Lotto officials only contact winners if they are subscribers, Lotto spokeswoman Carolyn Hapeman said.