Great followup to an earlier bonkers story about guaranteeing a Lottery win.
Last spring, a small group of Texas lottery retailers received word that a single customer wanted to arrange a guaranteed lottery win. No player had matched all six numbers for months, so by mid-April the Lotto Texas jackpot had soared to $95 million. To acquire it, the customer was prepared to spend millions of dollars to buy up every, or nearly every, possible numeric combination in the draw — about 26 million tickets.
The operation should have been apparent to the Texas Lottery Commission, which closely monitors sales. Then-Executive Director Gary Grief later described buying in the days leading up to the April 22, 2023, draw as “through the roof.” Instead of the typical 1-2 million tickets Lotto Texas games sell, it sold more than 28 million.
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Records show the agency first helped the big buyer by jumping to fill several unusual last-minute requests for large orders of extra equipment.
To process millions of tickets in the 72 hours between Lotto draws, the retail outlets behind the operation needed to quickly and dramatically ramp up their operations. Lottery tickets must be purchased and printed on state-issued lottery terminals; most retailers have one or two of the machines.
The outlet owned by an Austin-based company, Lottery.com, hadn’t sold any tickets for months, records show. But on April 19, the day buying for the April 22 Lotto draw began, the company submitted an urgent order to the lottery commission.
“Retailer has requested 10 additional terminals,” the request read, adding: “Will need lots of terminal paper. Install ASAP per CK” — referring to a lottery commission employee. The request was filled, records show.
The same day, a Waco retailer affiliated with Lottery.com, ALTx, filed another rush order. It, too, had sold virtually no tickets in recent months, according to state lottery sales data. Now, correspondence with the lottery commission stated, “Retailer has requested 5 additional terminals ASAP.” Records show the terminals were delivered.
In North Texas, meanwhile, a third retailer owned by a company called Lottery Now also sprang to life. At the beginning of the year, its store outside of Fort Worth had a single lottery terminal. As the big-jackpot game approached, however, it asked the Texas Lottery Commission to help it acquire another dozen ticket terminals, which records show was done.
A Texas Lottery Commission spokesman characterized the last-minute orders and the agency’s response as business as usual: “Retailer requests for additional lottery terminals for the specified period followed the agency’s standard process.”
In its eagerness to help the retailers with their last-minute equipment requests to handle the big operation, the lottery commission also appears to have ignored its own rules.
Because the Austin-area outlet owned by Lottery.com had been idle for so long, it required the lottery commission to reactivate its state-issued retailer license before it could start processing tickets for the April 22 draw.
“We are ready to resume operations,” a Lottery.com representative wrote on April 19 at 9:42 a.m. An agency contact replied seven minutes later: “Your status is now active.”
Yet state regulators appear not to have conducted due diligence. Texas law requires lottery retailers to conduct business other than ticket sales. They also must be open and accessible to the public when processing tickets.
Lottery.com’s Austin operations appear not to have met those requirements during the frantic April 22 operation.
Yet the agency did more than merely observe as one buyer effectively stacked the odds of securing the jackpot, records show. Behind the scenes, the lottery commission actively helped orchestrate a sure-thing win in a state-sponsored game of chance, seemingly ignoring its own rules in the process.
See here for the background, and be sure to read the rest. As the story notes, nothing illegal happened here, but the Lottery Commission (allegedly, they dispute at least some of the allegations in the story) violated their own rules. While it’s possible that they took this course of action because why not, they didn’t think there was any reason not to, it’s not at all hard to imagine some kind of shady, possibly illegal, arrangement at the bottom of it all. I’m sure there’s more investigation going on, perhaps we’ll see something.
In any event, the company at the forefront of this was at best in poor operating condition and a financial risk, with their ability to pay for the tickets in question, which the Lottery Commission seems to have overlooked. It’s honestly a little confusing why the Lottery Commission helped these guys out; I hope that question continues to be pursued. Again, nothing illegal happened here, but other states have seen things like this happen before, and some of them have changed their rules to prevent repeats. Perhaps the Lege should look at that.
I’m also still kind of hung up on the logistics of this all. I mean, 26 million tickets were sold, and if they all had to be printed on those terminals, there had to be a hell of a lot of them working on that to accomplish the task in the short amount of time available. That presumably means a lot of coordination, and likely a small army of people to handle and index the physical output. How exactly did they pull this off? And how hilarious would it have been if they had had to split the jackpot with one or more other winners? I hope we get some more answers in the future.