I Scratched My Ticket Too Hard, What Should I Do?

In the holiday and post-holiday rush this month, we’ve heard from a couple lottery players who both made the same mistake and wondered what to do next. 

The players had scratched their tickets a little too hard and in the process, they damaged the code on the ticket that normally would be scanned to claim a prize. They were worried that without the code, the ticket couldn’t be redeemed. But there’s another way that the information can be entered!

Each lottery ticket that we sell here in Iowa has identifying numbers on it that can manually be entered into a lottery terminal to check the results of the ticket. It’s not something you as a player can do using our mobile app – the ticket code is required on the app.

But if the code can’t be read for some reason, a clerk at a lottery retail location or a staffer at one of our lottery offices can key in the identifying numbers from the ticket to determine its outcome. If the clerk at your local store isn’t sure how to do that, they can always call the Iowa Lottery’s retail hotline for help.

If you’d prefer to have us at the lottery check your ticket for you, please make an appointment to visit one of our offices, or in most cases, you can mail the ticket to us if that would be easier.

I’ll add this caveat to the details here: If your ticket is really badly mangled or damaged, it might not be possible for anyone to figure out the identifying numbers from it. And in that case, we might not be able to determine its outcome. As an example, a player who had spilled water on their Powerball tickets once microwaved them to try to dry them out. The tickets are printed on heat-sensitive paper, and you can probably guess what happened: Microwaving the tickets turned them solid black. There was no way for anyone to determine the details that had once been printed on them.

We’ll always do our best to help, but it’s important to keep your tickets in as good of shape as possible so you can claim any prize you’ve won!

Comments

[Mary Neubauer]

Love your outlook, Julie! Positive thinking! :)

[Julie Glandorf]

lesson learned....buy another it will make you feel better!