What would you do with a million dollars? It's a question we've all pondered at one time or another. For Aurea Privee, she could smell the sweetness of the bills being fanned in front of her face. She was so close to a million dollars that she could literally taste it. But close only counts in horseshoes, unfortunately, and Privee's million-dollar dream quickly turned into a poor man's nightmare.

Aurea Privee walked into the Fiesta Casino in Henderson and started playing the penny video poker machines. The retired Privee had an ongoing relationship with the Fiesta casino; mostly of the give-give variety. Privee played the machines, but rarely won. Privee claims she spent twenty minutes between her regular bingo games dropping her pennies into a video poker machine. After a string of mediocre hands, Privee finally caught the hand of a lifetime.

The buzzers sounded, the coins dropped, and hearts raced as Privee had suddenly hit the one-million dollar and eight-two cent jackpot. Excited to be Nevada's newest millionaire, Privee was attempting to retrieve her money when an agent from the Nevada Gaming Control Board showed up unexpectedly. Upon “careful” examination, the agent found that the machine's maximum jackpot was supposedly set at $20,000, $980,000 shy of Privees prize. So, why would a machine set at $20,000 spit out $1,000,000? It's a question Privee wanted answered.

After the casino's insistence that the machine malfunctioned and that the $1,000,000 prize was a fabrication of Privee's vision, her husband quickly showed the photos he had taken of the million-dollar jackpot in two places. The gaming control agent claimed that the real prize was only $800. Rather than take a lesser prize, Privee put her trust in attorney Nikolas Mastrangelo.

The attorney asks the question we all want to know. If the machine supposedly malfunctioned, what exactly was the malfunction? The fact that the casino cannot answer this question only lends credibility to multiple conspiracy theories which imply that casinos never intend for you to win a progressive jackpot. The fact that it happened wasn't covered up at all. The casino stated that it was in fact a “malfunction.” Now, it's up to the casino to correctly define the word malfunction to the rest of its casino goers - which doesn't seem likely.

Finally, the casino blamed the malfunction on their lack of software upgrades, which makes it a human error (for not manually upgrading) and not a mechanical error, which means Privee is entitled to the prize; a taste of the casino's own technicality medicine. But that's not the case at all. The case seems clear-cut to many observes, and the line between malfunction and negligence is quite broad, yet too transparent to hide behind.

To date, Aurea Privee is still waiting for her case to be heard by the Gaming Board. Hypothetically, she stands a chance, but in actuality, she has the same chance of getting her money as she does of hitting another million-dollar progressive jackpot. If irony paid off, Privee would be set for life.