Powerball winner Edwin Castro will hang onto his record-breaking $2.04 billion winnings after a California judge tossed a lawsuit by someone claiming the ticket was stolen from him.
A Los Angeles County judge tentatively dismissed the lawsuit by Jose Rivera last month, but it became official Tuesday after Rivera failed to fight the ruling, TMZ said, citing court documents.
It means Castro no longer has to fight to prove he is the rightful owner of the jackpot, the biggest in US history, nearly two years after he won.
While Rivera has claimed the ticket was stolen from him, the judge ruled that “players are solely responsible for securing their Tickets against theft, loss, damage, or destruction.”
“The person in possession of a … winning lottery ticket … is the presumptive owner/winner,” the judge wrote, according to TMZ.
Castro, 31, nabbed the life-changing jackpot in November 2022, and opted for the lump sum payout of $997.7 million.
After taxes, he took home about $628 million, according to the California Lottery.
Castro was sued by Rivera in 2023.
In court papers obtained by The Post at the time, Rivera claimed that he bought the winning ticket on Nov. 7, 2022 – just one day before the drawing.
But a man identified as Urachi “Reggie” Romero allegedly stole the ticket and “refused” to return it, the complaint said.
Reggie supposedly told Rivera that the “ticket was a loser.”
It was unclear how the ticket came into Castro’s possession.
After his windfall, Castro quickly shelled out $47 million for a Hollywood Hills mansion, and also dropped $4 million on a house for his parents in Altadena.
In July, he went public with his model girlfriend, Payten Vincent, 24, in a series of loved-up social media posts.
The pair were first spotted together at Nobu in Los Angeles in earlier that month.
A self-described poet with 125,000 Instagram followers, Vincent worked as a barista at Starbucks in Falmouth, Maine, and as a TD Bank teller before moving to LA, according to her LinkedIn.