A Tennessee gas station clerk’s plan to cheat a customer out of a $1 million lottery ticket and to claim it for himself was thwarted after store video captured the clerk pretending to throw the ticket away and then celebrating after retrieving it from the trash, according to prosecutors.

The store clerk, Meer Patel, 23, of Murfreesboro, Tenn., has been charged with theft over $250,000. He went to Tennessee Lottery’s district office in Nashville on July 16 to cash the seven-figure winning ticket, according to court documents. But lottery employees became suspicious after analyzing Mr. Patel’s identification and hearing his story about finding the ticket in the trash, court documents said. The lottery employees then asked police to review video from the Shell station in Murfreesboro where the ticket was bought, the local station WSMV reported.

The images showed that on July 13, the buyer purchased a couple lottery tickets from the station and showed them to Mr. Patel to see if he had won any money, according to court records. Mr. Patel scanned the tickets’ bar code but “failed to disclose to the victim that it was a winning ticket and instead placed it in the trash,” records said.

“He knew it was a winning ticket,” Lt. Steve Craig of the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office said in an interview on Wednesday.

Winning tickets from the Tennessee Lottery display if they are worth more than $600, Lieutenant Craig said, clarifying that Mr. Patel knew that the ticket was worth more than $600 but not necessarily that it was worth $1 million.

After the buyer left, Mr. Patel then returned to the trash, picked up the winning ticket and is seen on video “celebrating in the store after scratching off the front of the ticket and learning it was a $1 million winner,” Detective Dennis Ward said in a news release.