'That was our eureka moment,' Taylor said.

'All we had to go on was the clothes he was wearing, the people he was with and the part of his face that wasn't covered with a mask,' Taylor said.įinally, after poring over surveillance footage around the casino and the hotel, investigators saw someone matching the winner's description get into a vehicle. There were no clues about the winner's name or where he came from - and since this wasn't a criminal case, Taylor said his team couldn't rely on legal methods like subpoenas. The search took 20 days and hundreds of hours of combing through surveillance footage.

Two days later, Treasure Island asked the Nevada Gaming Control Board to help identify the winner. When the machine was fixed two days later, the casino learned Taylor was owed a lot more than that: He hit the $229,368.52 US ($290,644.32 Cdn) progressive jackpot. He was paid out his remaining credits and a few more dollars for his trouble, Chief Taylor said, 'so he walked out of there with about $40.' It was the right thing to do to find the owner of this money.'Īrizona resident Robert Taylor had only been playing The Mask slot machine for a few minutes on Jan. 'But we really wanted to put a lot of effort into this. 'We thought it was a long shot to be able to identify him,' Taylor told As It Happens host Carol Off. It took weeks of 'good old-fashioned police work' to find him and award him his money, says James Taylor (no relation to the winner), chief of the enforcement division at the Nevada Gaming Control Board.

Robert Taylor hit the jackpot at Treasure Island Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas last month - but due to a slot machine glitch, he walked away unaware of his big win.

Slot machine jackpot winners