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Meet the Humane Society’s Taylor Swift Sweepstakes Winner
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Meet the Humane Society’s Taylor Swift Sweepstakes Winner

A winner has been chosen as a massive fundraiser for the Kitchener Waterloo and Stratford Perth Humane Society draws to a close.

The animal welfare organization launched a 50/50 draw in September, but money wasn’t the focus: the winner was also promised a pair of coveted tickets to the one of the stops on Taylor Swift’s Era’s tour in Toronto.

The humane society hoped to raise about $40,000. In the end, the overall total reached $725,000. Half of this money will support the work of the humanitarian society, while the other half will go to the winner.

Meet Eva Lin

The winning ticket was chosen on November 1 and for one Taylor Swift fan, her “wildest dreams” came true.

“I don’t even have words to explain how I feel about this right now. And it’s crazy, like I think I’m in a dream. Someone’s going to pinch me and it’s all fake, but I know it’s real now,” Eva Lin told CTV News Kitchener on Monday.

“Screaming, hyperventilating, anything you can think of. Then I had to call my husband, call my brother. I’m like, ‘You all need to check this out again,'” Lin recounted the moment she found out she had won. “(There was) a lot of screaming and crying that weekend.”

Lin said she purchased 999 tickets for the drawing and purchased the winning ticket the last night before sales closed. Her tickets cost her $250, which was a tidy profit of $362,250 after she claimed her big prize.

She came all the way from Ottawa to claim her prize. She heard about the competition from her brother, who lives in the Kitchener-Waterloo area.

Lin told CTV News she is a Taylor Swift superfan and has attended 11 concerts so far.

“We’ve been to every show together since the Red Tour and we were debating whether or not we should buy tickets,” she explained. “The last day of the draw, I’m like, you know what, go big or go home.”

Usually she goes with her brother, but this time she will bring her husband.

As for the money, she doesn’t yet know what she wants to spend it on.

“(I’ll) probably give back a little bit and make a little bit of investment here and there, but other than that, nothing, not much planned,” she said.