New Step In the Process When You Check A Ticket Using Our Mobile App

An update being made today to our mobile app allows you to clear out the results of the previous ticket before starting to scan another one.

We’re making the change after input from some players who said this additional step could help make the process of checking tickets on the app more clear for them. This update is designed to do just that.

So now, when you check a ticket on the mobile app and have had a chance to review the results, you’ll click the “Clear Scan Results” button to remove that information from the screen. You then can proceed with checking the next ticket, and since you’ve cleared the results of the previous one, you’ll be starting with a clean slate. We hope this change will be a positive!

We debuted our app for Apple AND Android devices back in 2017, and like any technology, we’ve updated it over time. If you already have our app (it’s called the Iowa Lottery’s LotteryPlus) on your device, there’s nothing you need to do to receive this update. It happens automatically. If you don’t yet have the app, feel free to install it from the Google Play Store® or Apple iTunes Store® as applicable for your particular device.

The most popular way that people use our app is to check the results of their lottery tickets. You can check lotto, scratch and InstaPlay tickets on the app, so you don’t have to visit a store or a lottery office to see if you’ve won. Two other popular ways that people use the app is to enter their tickets into our VIP Club drawings and to check the winning numbers in recent lotto drawings.

Thank you for playing the lottery, and we hope this update makes it even easier for you to use our mobile technology!

Comments

[Mary Neubauer]

Hi, Gina. It sounds like perhaps your issue has already been resolved, but in general, when you receive the "see a retailer" message, it can mean that a step was missed in the process to make the tickets "live" when the store involved began selling them. Our scratch tickets are not activated -- meaning they are not live -- when they are delivered to a retail location. The store that receives the tickets has to scan them to activate them before it begins selling them. If that step is missed in the process, the results of the ticket can't be read properly afterwards, and you as the player can receive a message saying "see a retailer." If you get a message like that again, please feel free to check back with the store where you bought your ticket to ensure that it was activated.

[Gina Rowley]

I think it's much better after the update

[Gina]

Why do some tickets tell me to see a retailer when I use mobile scanner?

[Mary Neubauer]

Hi, Jennifer. If your ticket is damaged to the point that the "Scratch to Cash" code can't be scanned on the app, there isn't another way to check the ticket on the app. The ticket can manually be checked at a retail location if the identifying numbers from the front and back of the ticket are still legible and can be entered manually by a clerk. If both the code and the identifying numbers on the ticket are damaged, you can always send the ticket to us at the lottery and we can see if there is enough information still legible on the ticket for us to be able to look it up. Unfortunately when tickets are damaged, it sometimes isn't even possible for us to find enough information on them to determine the outcome of the ticket, but we can try. If you do send the ticket to us, please sign the back of it and include an explanatory note that you would like us to try to determine the outcome of the damaged ticket.

[Mary Neubauer]

Hi, Jana. A suggestion you might try is to access the app from your mobile carrier connection rather than from wifi to avoid the two platforms from interrupting each other. And, if you still have the particular ticket that caused the app to be slow in returning results, please feel free to send an image of the ticket to us at [email protected]. We can have our I.T. folks look up the particular results of that ticket on the app to determine what may have happened as it was being scanned.