ialottery blog

The Latest On The Withdrawn Jackpot Claim

With the crush of media calls today, I am just now having a chance to blog about the latest unusual twist in the claim – and now withdrawal of the claim – for the multi-million-dollar Hot Lotto jackpot won in December 2010 in Des Moines.

We received confirmation a little after 6 p.m. last night that the claim for the ticket was being withdrawn. It’s definitely the real winning ticket and it was worth millions of dollars. We wanted to pay the prize and have said repeatedly that we were ready to pay the prize, but we needed just some basic information before we could do so.

Ultimately, the folks representing Hexham Investments Trust said they wouldn’t provide the information, so they were walking away.

I’ve been asked several different times by reporters today what we think/how we feel/what our reaction is. We’re disappointed that this prize won’t be paid. But at the same time, we focused throughout the process of doing the right thing and wanted to be thoughtful, methodical and careful in our approach. I would hope that’s what everyone would want us to do when there are millions of dollars on the line. And there definitely were in this instance!

So, now what happens to the money? The total involved is the $10.75 million in cash that was on hand from the sale of tickets for that particular Hot Lotto jackpot drawing. The money will be returned to the 15 lotteries that sell the Hot Lotto game in proportion to the percentage of sales that came from each state.

Here in Iowa, the money will ultimately go into the Iowa Lottery’s prize pools for future games and promotions. We’re talking about having a promotion in the spring to give away the money, maybe something with the theme that “everyone deserves a second chance”! We can have some fun with it. We haven’t had a chance yet to work through those details, but we will do so as soon as we can.

Here is the statement we issued last night: 

DES MOINES, Iowa – Iowa Lottery officials met Thursday evening with local counsel from the Davis Brown Law Firm representing Hexham Investments Trust. Following that meeting, Iowa Lottery CEO Terry Rich released the following statement:

“This has been and continues to be the strangest situation that we can recall in the 26-year history of our lottery.

We were excited when the Hot Lotto jackpot-winning ticket was presented in December and we were hopeful that we’d soon be paying out the big prize to the lucky winner. That has not happened. And in fact, late this afternoon, the jackpot claim from Hexham Investments Trust of Bedford, N.Y., was withdrawn. We received confirmation of the claim withdrawal shortly after 6 p.m. today from the Davis Brown Law Firm here in Des Moines.    

As you likely know, the winning ticket for the Hot Lotto jackpot won in December 2010 in Des Moines was turned in here at the lottery with less than two hours to go before the prize would have expired. The winning ticket was signed by a trustee on behalf of Hexham Investments Trust, but no member of the trust was present when the ticket was brought to the lottery by two lawyers on Dec. 29.

That day, and since that time, we have been requesting basic information so we could confirm that the winning ticket was legally purchased, legally possessed and legally presented. This standard information is routinely requested of jackpot winners here in Iowa as part of our security processes to comply with both Iowa law and our lottery’s game rules. Those details usually are received within minutes at the time a winning ticket is presented, not in weeks or months. It has been 13 months since the purchase of this ticket and the drawing in which it won the jackpot.   

Those specifics in this instance were not shared with us when the ticket was brought to the lottery, and have still not been shared with us nearly a month later. We established 3 p.m. CST tomorrow as the deadline for that information to be provided so we could bring closure to the situation and move forward.

On Monday, we had informed the trust’s local counsel at the Davis Brown Law Firm in Des Moines of today’s deadline and specified in a letter the information we were requesting. Throughout this week, we remained in contact with lawyers at Davis Brown about our request. We received a letter from the law firm on Wednesday, specifying that if jackpot were to be paid to the trust, all of the winnings would be donated to charity. However, the specifics we sought were not provided.

The Lottery sent a reply to Davis Brown on Thursday, declining to pay the prize because of our concerns about the legality of the purchase, possession, and presentation of this ticket. A copy of that correspondence has been provided today.
 
During conversations with the lottery, Mr. Shaw specified that he is not the beneficiary of Hexham Investments Trust, only its lawyer and trustee. He also specified that he is not the person who purchased the winning ticket in Des Moines, and stated that the recipient of Hexham Investments Trust was a corporation in the country of Belize. He stated that he ultimately did not know the identity of the winner(s).

Through this process, we have tried our best to remain open and transparent, while protecting the integrity of the Iowa Lottery and its games.”

The Latest On The Hot Lotto Jackpot Claim

Here’s video of our news conference when the winning ticket for that Hot Lotto jackpot was turned in with less than two hours to spare before the prize-claim period was set to expire.

Yesterday was a crazy day, but if it’s possible, I think today has been even busier. We here at the lottery have now been contacted by multiple people, each of whom individually claims that the winning ticket was stolen from them. We don’t yet know the credibility of any of those claims, but those are just some of the details we’ll be looking for as we continue to investigate this prize claim.

You know, in any high-profile situation like this, there will be rumors. Our job is to separate fact from fiction. Over the past 12 months, we’ve heard hundreds of stories from people who wondered if they’d bought the winning ticket. But the fact is, only one of those stories can be true. And the high-tech security behind a lottery ticket gives us a lot of valuable tools to use in our security process.

This is the first time the lottery has been through a situation like this in our 26-year history. We’ll continue our work, understanding that the security and integrity of the Iowa Lottery and its games cannot be compromised.

Jackpot-Winning Ticket Turned in With Two Hours To Spare

The lottery released this statement earlier today:

DES MOINES, Iowa – Iowa Lottery CEO Terry Rich issued the following statement Thursday regarding the claim of the Hot Lotto jackpot after nearly a year:

“The winning ticket for the multi-million-dollar Hot Lotto jackpot won on Dec. 29, 2010, here in Iowa has been presented today to the Iowa Lottery, coming in just under the wire before the prize was set to expire. It appears that the repeated reminders we’ve issued over the past year – and the information that the media helped us distribute to the public – worked as we had hoped, and brought in the winner just in the nick of time. 

We worried for months that the jackpot would not be claimed, so we’re glad that the winning ticket has been turned in. We emphasize, however, that the money has not been paid out -- and will not be paid out -- until the lottery has been able to complete the security process for a jackpot win.

This security process is a standard part of a jackpot claim, but additional security scrutiny is required in this particular instance by the rules of the Hot Lotto game because more than half the prize-claim period for the jackpot had expired.

The jackpot-winning ticket was presented to the lottery today by a representative of a Des Moines law firm on behalf of a trust. We have not yet had the opportunity to meet with the actual winners and ask the security questions we need to have answered regarding the ticket and its purchase.

The jackpot-winning ticket was presented by Julie Johnson McLean of the Davis, Brown, Koehn, Shors & Roberts law firm in Des Moines on behalf of Hexam Investments Trust, with Crawford Shaw of Bedford, N.Y., as the trustee. Ms. Johnson McLean had the winning ticket validated today at lottery headquarters in Des Moines, but no representative of the trust was present.

The Davis-Brown firm contacted the lottery on Tuesday (Dec. 27), indicating that it had been asked to provide legal services to a trust in connection with the jackpot claim. This was not the first inquiry we had received from a lawyer on behalf of a client about this jackpot, and in none of the other instances did those involved have the winning ticket. We did not want to comment specifically about any of the inquiries until and unless someone actually brought the winning ticket here to the lottery, and that just happened this afternoon. The name of the trust was shared with us here at the Iowa Lottery when the ticket was presented today.

Don’t Get Locked Out Of The VIP Club …

As entries into the Super Tech holiday promotion have picked up this month, so have the number of players getting locked out of their Iowa Lottery VIP Club accounts. And in the process of talking with some of those folks, we discovered they’re doing something that is causing the problem. Here’s the back story:

As you likely already know, each nonwinning scratch ticket sold in Iowa now is worth points when you enter it in our VIP Club. And, you can use your points for all sorts of cool items in our VIP Club store, from music downloads to the hottest electronics, jewelry, housewares and more. (Hint-hint: Remember holiday shopping season!)

You can only enter nonwinning scratch tickets in your VIP Club account. Winning tickets are invalid entries because after all, you’ll need to turn them in to claim your prizes! 

Well, it seems that some people have been mis-using their VIP Club accounts to give themselves a surprise. Rather than looking at their tickets and determining whether they’d won a prize – or checking their tickets at one of the self-checkers we have in retail locations across the state – they’ve just been trying to enter all of their tickets into their VIP Club accounts. They said it made it more fun, that they actually liked it when they got an “invalid entry” message because that meant the particular ticket they were entering had won a prize.

That is not what the VIP Club is designed for, and YOU WILL BE LOCKED OUT of your account if you make too many invalid entries on the system. It’s a security feature built into the VIP Club to protect both you as a lottery player and the integrity of the lottery’s games.  

So, if you’ve been using your VIP Club account to try to figure out if your ticket has won a prize, please don’t do that anymore. You likely will soon be locked out of your VIP Club account, and it can take some time for your account to be reset.

We’re glad to see how many of you are entering the Super Tech promotion and we don’t want you to miss out on any of the time you have to enter, so please be sure to enter only the codes from nonwinning scratch tickets. Happy playing, and good luck!

Looks Like Scammers Have Hijacked Our Phone #

Our front desk here at Lottery headquarters in Des Moines has been getting calls today from folks who say someone has been contacting them from our telephone number. The ultimate goal of the calls the people have been receiving appears to be an attempt to get their sensitive personal and financial information – or perhaps even money.

Let me be clear: The calls are NOT from the Iowa Lottery, nor are we associated with them in any way. It’s yet another round of scams, and this time around, the con artists have come up with a way to spoof their return number to make it look like the call has come from us. We’re not the only entity being targeted by the fake caller ID numbers: the scammers also are spoofing the telephone numbers of banks, credit card companies and other government entities.

The problem has reached the point that Sen. Bill Nelson from Florida is sponsoring legislation to ban the transmission of false caller ID numbers.
 
It’s nearly impossible to stop the scammers: They’re part of a murky underworld, often operating from mobile locations outside the United States. The best defense is to be armed with information and to remember to NEVER give out your personal information to a caller.      

The ScamBusters website has some good information about this situation at:   www.scambusters.org/callerid.html

Have You Seen The Lottery’s Cool New Stuff?

Right now across the state, the look and feel of the Iowa Lottery is changing.

The familiar red lottery terminals that have been used for the past decade in Iowa are being replaced with new, smaller terminals. Self-checkers that lottery players can use to check their own tickets also are being installed for the first time in our state, along with lighted signs that automatically update the latest big jackpot amounts in Powerball® and Mega Millions®.

It’s all part of the lottery’s transition to a new statewide gaming system, an upgrade that happens about every 10 years. The changes will be completed in July, when the Iowa Lottery begins using a new computer system to sell and cash tickets at its 2,500 retailers statewide.

Some features of the new equipment will begin working now, but other options will come in the next several weeks. Statewide installation of equipment is just getting started and the lottery will hold news conferences in six cities across the state this week to give folks their first look at the new features.

Here are the highlights:    
•    The new lottery terminals are smaller, so they’ll take up less space in retail locations, and the machines will still feature touch-screen technology and thermal printers that use heat instead of ink to print lotto tickets.
•    Flat-screen monitors will be installed in a lot of locations that will display jackpot information and game details at the point of sale along with transaction details for players’ purchases.
•    Self-checkers will be installed away from the cash registers in many stores, giving lottery players the option of checking their own tickets rather than having store personnel check them.
•    New, lighted jackpot signs will go in the windows of many stores, meaning customers will be able to see the latest Powerball and Mega Millions jackpot amounts while they’re still outside.
•    And the lottery’s player loyalty program will get an update. It’s called the VIP Club and it started in 1994. The club is getting a new website and will offer special coupons, merchandise and prize drawings exclusively to those who join as members.     

The current sales-and-validations equipment here in Iowa has been in place since 2001 and the lottery’s contract for it expires this summer. We’ve been working on the new system for about 2½ years. There are only a few companies in the entire world that supply this type of equipment to ensure the security and integrity it takes to administer lottery games with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line. Scientific Games International, that’s based in Georgia, supplies the lottery’s current machines and has the contract for the new equipment, too. So at the store level, the change-over means the old lottery terminals are being removed at the same time the new equipment is being installed.
      
We know that everyone will be curious about the new self-checkers. This is the first time the Iowa Lottery has been able to offer the small, free-standing devices you can use to scan your own lottery tickets. We think the self-checkers will be a big convenience for both players and retailers. But because we’re in a transition phase right now, the devices will only read certain tickets right now. Look for a “self-check ticket” message along the top of lotto tickets in games like Powerball, and you’ll know you can scan that ticket with the self-checker. After July, you’ll also be able to check scratch tickets on your own.

One other important update we want our players to know: The games you play will stay the same. You’ll still be buying tickets in Powerball, Mega Millions and your other favorite lotto games. And of course there will still be scratch and pull-tab games. But the machines that print and cash your tickets will change and your tickets in lotto games like Powerball will look a little different.

Watch for the new lottery equipment at your local lottery retailer and have fun checking out the cool, new stuff!

Protect Your Tickets – And Your Winnings

Charges stemming from an undercover operation in Wisconsin are yet another reminder for you as a lottery player to protect your tickets -- and any winnings that may come from them.

The criminal case involves two convenience store clerks in Gotham and Arena, Wis., communities northwest of Madison. Each clerk has been charged with one count of attempted theft by fraud. Prosecutors say the two stole lottery tickets during an undercover operation by state agents. Click here to read local coverage.

Iowa Lottery Security investigators and agents from the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation have conducted ongoing security checks at Iowa retail locations. Hundreds of unannounced checks have been made over the past two years. And so far, all tickets have been properly handled in our state.

We’ll continue to run checks here, and we think Iowa’s retail system is functioning well. But the best thing you can do is to protect yourself by following some simple precautions.

Can’t Say It Enough: Beware Of Lottery Scams

We’ve been warning about it for years, but some recent examples in Delaware are a reminder to us all to be on the look-out for lottery scams.

Back in 2007, the lottery held a news conference with Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller to warn folks about the wave of lottery scams that were hitting at that time. The scams often involve counterfeit checks, fake letters, and promises of a prize that will be paid if you will just pay a few fees in advance. In the end, if you’re a victim, you lose your money -- often thousands of dollars.

Unfortunately, the scams haven’t stopped in the years since then. We get calls, e-mails and letters nearly every day from people ask about information they’ve received that clearly has come from scammers. We do our best  to warn them away from falling victim. 

Why is it so hard to stop the scams? The people behind them often operate from outside the United States and keep their operations on the move, making it almost impossible to track them. 

And why, you ask, do people fall for the scams? Well, everyone wants to think they’ve won, right? And the scammers can be extremely convincing.

The Delaware Lottery recently joined with the Attorney General in that state to issue a warning about an elaborate new scheme they were seeing in their area. Click here to read a media report about the issues there.

We keep on our website warnings about scams as well as general player security information that it’s good to know. Click here to go to our Player Security page. 

Be smart. Learn what you need to know to protect yourself against scams. And remember, if you didn’t buy a ticket, you did not win the lottery.

Prizes All Paid In Another Round Of Checks

Good news if you’ve ever bought a lottery ticket in Iowa or had a ticket redeemed here!

We’ve conducted another round of security checks at retail locations to see how winning lottery tickets are being handled, and we’re happy to report that all prizes were properly paid.

Some pretty serious problems with ticket redemption have been reported recently in other states, including Minnesota and California.

In Minnesota, eight people who worked at retail locations have been charged with felony lottery fraud after retail compliance checks by the Minnesota Lottery in December and January. Investigators say each of the clerks kept a winning ticket they were presented and attempted to claim the prize themselves. 

And this year in California, more than two dozen people working at retail outlets have been arrested for the grand theft of winning lottery tickets. All of the California suspects are accused of cheating lottery customers.

Here in Iowa, we’ve conducted a couple rounds of security checks.

Lottery security investigators posing as customers visited 126 Iowa retail locations in late February and presented lottery tickets for cashing that each had won a prize of up to $100. The outlets were in 76 communities in 54 counties and included urban and rural locations. We also went to a mix of the different types of businesses that sell lottery tickets. In every instance, the location paid the correct amount.

This week, we followed that up with another round of checks, this time at 14 locations in eight communities in central and western Iowa. And again, winning tickets were presented that had each won prizes of up to $100 and all prizes were properly paid. It appears we’ve got a smooth-running system in our state, but we all have to be on the look-out if we’re going to protect ourselves against fraud.

We’re going to keep doing these random checks of the ticket-cashing process. At the lottery, we consider it part of our duty to protect consumers as well as the integrity of the Iowa Lottery.

You can help by contacting us if you ever have a concern about the lottery, its products or operations. Our main number is 515-725-7900 and our e-mail is Wmaster@ialottery.com. If you have a security-related concern, please call our Security Department directly at 515-725-7888.

Follow-Up On Lottery Security Checks

The security checks we just conducted at retail locations across Iowa have revealed something we need to work on when it comes to the process of checking and cashing lottery tickets. Only about half the retailers we visited required that lottery tickets be signed before checking or cashing them.

Putting your signature on the back of your ticket is a requirement the Iowa Lottery put in place last year as part of our elevated focus on lottery security. You know, having a signature on a lottery ticket really protects everyone in the ticket-validation process. From the start, it identifies the ticket as belonging to you so that if the ticket is given to someone else in the validation process, it’s still identified as your property. That protects the customer and it protects the retailer against any questions that might come up later.

We’re going to renew our efforts to educate the public about the importance of signatures on lottery tickets, and we’ll specifically visit those locations that did not ask for signatures to inform them that ongoing violations will not be tolerated.

Iowa has had a very strong record regarding lottery security and all of our increased efforts over the past few years have been designed to protect against even the possibility of fraud. Yes, there have been problems in other areas, but those problems don’t appear to exist in our state and we want to make sure that it stays that way