Here’s a tip we shared with a player this week who thought we’d reported the wrong winning numbers in Powerball®.
It turns out he was looking at the wrong date on his ticket.
In a game like Powerball, the date of the drawing where your ticket could win a prize is printed in large font right in the center of the paper, just above the plays you bought.
The date that you bought your ticket is in the upper right corner of the ticket, in a year-month-day format. You also can see the exact time that the ticket was printed. We provide those details as a security feature to help track and identify the ticket.
The player mistakenly thought that the purchase date on his ticket was the date of the drawing in which it could win a prize.
And when he went to our website to check the results of his ticket, he thought it should have won a prize. But when he scanned the ticket with the lottery’s mobile app on his phone, he got a message saying it wasn’t a winner.
We all can probably imagine ourselves in that situation. The man said he scanned his ticket several times, thinking that the results would change. He even took his ticket to a store to have it checked on the lottery terminal to double-check the results provided by the mobile app. Every time, the results showed that his ticket had not won a prize.
The man then emailed us to ask if something had gone wrong with the results we reported for the drawing.
We were able to figure out that he was looking at the wrong date on his ticket, and then he understood the difference!
The same details apply to tickets in any of our lotto games, not just Powerball. (The others are Mega Millions®, Lotto America®, Lucky for Life®, Pick 3 and Pick 4.)
So now you’ll get it right when you check the tickets you buy!
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