News writer; Opinion columnist
What's the most expensive mistake you ever made? Maybe it was the time you forgot to return a piece of clothing that didn't fit, or you bought a used car that fell apart after a few hundred miles. But have you ever screwed up so badly that it cost someone a million dollars?
With fortunes at stake, we expect that lottery organizations will run their games flawlessly and deliver the correct numbers and winners every time. But given that there are thousands of lottery games spread across the country, it's inevitable that someone is going to screw up.
These are true stories of lottery organizations that made mistakes and cost players millions.
You are never a winner
It seems like it should be almost impossible to screw up a lottery draw game. All you need to do is pick and announce the winning numbers. How hard can that be?
Apparently, for the New Mexico Lottery, it was too hard in 2019, when a computer error meant that entire sequences of numbers were automatically eliminated before the drawing even happened.
This nightmare scenario occurred when the state lottery introduced the Pick 4, a game in which players had to select four numbers to win. Rather than selecting numbers from a spinning drum or a physical device, the game used a custom computer program to generate random four-digit numbers to choose a winner.
The only problem was that, due to an error in the number-generating program's code, it would never select any four-digit sequences with repeating digits. For example, while 1-2-3-4 could be a winner, the program would never pick a ticket with the numbers 1-1-3-4 or 1-2-2-4. Each digit on the ticket had to be different to have a chance to win.
Since players had no way of knowing this, thousands of them bought tickets with repeated numbers that couldn't win. The lottery didn't realize there was a problem until someone noticed that after two weeks, the computer never selected numbers with repeating digits.
This issue reveals one of the main problems with digital drawings. While it's easy to notice when something goes wrong with a traditional ball machine, it's impossible to know what's happening within the circuits and coding of a computer program.
Once the New Mexico lottery recognized the error, it issued a press release announcing its mistake. The organization claimed there were 33 botched drawings and that anyone who retained their ticket from those drawings with repeating digits was entitled to a refund.
While on the surface, computerized drawings should be safer and cheaper to run than physical ones, there have been numerous instances of digital number selectors malfunctioning.
- A drawing program in Arizona selected the same number several times in a row.
- In Delaware, several lottery players cashed in when they recognized that the state's number selector was also picking the exact same number.
- A separate Arizona drawing program eliminated up to 8% of possible number combinations for the Arizona Lottery Pick 3 game.
Hopefully, these compounding errors will drive state lotteries back to the fun and excitement of televised drawings with the spinning drum.
You are still never a winner
While computers make plenty of mistakes, let's not forget the potential of humans to completely screw things up on their own.
The Connecticut Lottery kicked off the new year in 2018 with a big swing and miss when a human error meant that 100,000 number combinations were eliminated from consideration from the Super Draw drawing before any were selected.
The fiasco was due to a pair of lottery employees who entered the wrong number set into the random number generator that picks winning tickets. The employees set the range from 100,001 to 214,601 when they were supposed to put it from 100,001 to 314,601.
The faulty setting meant that the program could not select a ticket with a numeric value above 214,601 as a winner.
The Connecticut Lottery issued a statement explaining how the mistake occurred:
We apologize that the January 1, 2018, CT Super Draw drawing did not go as planned. Although there were many layers of protection and security in place, human error occurred despite multiple practice drawings. The incorrect ticket range was entered into the Random Number Generator, the machine that draws the winning numbers.
Once they discovered the error, Lottery officials temporarily stopped players from cashing in their winning tickets from the flawed drawing, creating a rare situation in which both the game's winners and losers were enraged.
However, shortly after the payout freeze, officials announced that a second drawing would be held and all tickets purchased for the first drawing would be eligible to win. Additionally, they allowed winners from the first drawing to cash their tickets.
In a statement posted to its website, lottery officials wrote:
Due to human error, 100,000 ticket numbers were not included in this morning’s Super Draw drawing. Our goal, first and foremost, is to make our players whole. In order to do so, a second drawing will take place shortly that includes the corrected ticket number range. All winning tickets from both drawings will be honored.
The news of a second drawing was not satisfying to everyone, as several players told reporters they had discarded their tickets after losing the first drawing. Player Richard Logozzo explained to reporters:
I go to the automatic reader, and if it says not a winner, there's a trash receptacle there, and I drop it in.
In response to the mistake, the Connecticut Lottery placed the two officials responsible for setting the numbers on leave from their jobs.
No take-backs
It's easy to lose the lottery. Almost everyone has done it, and we rarely feel bad about it. Most of us know that the odds are long to begin with, and there's always another game to play.
However, one man in Switzerland didn't learn he was a loser until after he was told he was a winner.
This particular lottery fiasco began in 2018, with a drawing for the Swiss lottery. This game didn't depend on numbers. Instead, players would buy a ticket, write their name on it, and hope their name was chosen. For this specific game, ten names were entered into the final drawing for the jackpot, including Andreas Bürkli.
When the tickets were finally drawn, Bürkli, who watched the drawing happen live on TV, was declared the winner.
The show played a fanfare, rained confetti down on the stage, and even showed a briefcase full of cash. There was just one problem: in reality, Bürkli won nothing.
The situation is complex, but the issue comes down to one significant problem. Due to a series of errors and miscommunications, eleven names were placed in the barrel instead of ten. The rules of the game explicitly stated that the final drawing would include only 10 names, so the results of the 11-name drawing were deemed invalid, and another one had to be held.
The TV station responsible for the drawing, SRF, issued an apology to Bürkli, and a spokesperson for the station said he understood, and “You could even say he was a good sport."
That makes sense because an official apology is almost as good as one million dollars.
Hide and seek
There is one essential part of holding a lottery that one would think would be impossible to screw up: you have to announce the winner. However, this crucial step was beyond the UK National Lottery's capabilities and cost some players prizes worth over one million dollars.
The problem centered on the National Lottery's 2016 Lotto Olympic Medal Draw, a lottery game intended to celebrate the country hosting the 2016 Summer Olympics. The game was a raffle with a top prize of £5.45 million (approximately $7 million). This jackpot was meant to be split among five winners; however, there was one significant problem: the lottery never announced who those winners were.
In total, the game had 88 winners, but due to a web coding error, the website announcing the top eight winners was invisible to anyone looking for it, and the money due to those winners was never claimed. The National Lottery explained that all of the unclaimed money was donated to a good cause.
This massive failure occurred shortly after a separate error on the National Lottery's app told players who scanned winning tickets that they hadn't won anything.
Camelot, the company responsible for running the lottery, blamed all of this on a “software coding error,” which I'm sure was comforting to the players who lost out on a one-million-dollar prize.
The company's mistakes were so egregious that the government slapped them with a £1.2 million fine, which is significantly less than the amount of money it caused winning players to lose out on.
In a statement, a National Lottery spokesperson stated:
It is crucial that the National Lottery is run fairly, safely, and with integrity, and we'll continue to hold Camelot to account. We accept the outcome of the Gambling Commission's investigation in respect of a number of incidents dating back to 2016.
Close the door
What's one of the first things you do after you leave the house? You lock the door. However, this small step was simply too much for Massachusetts Lottery officials.
Some lottery mistakes are complicated, involving complex computer programs or coding mistakes that would take a software engineer to understand. But sometimes they're so stupid you wonder how game organizers found their way to work that morning.
That was the case for a June 5 Massachusetts Lottery Mass Cash drawing in which someone forgot to latch the door of the ball machine. As soon as the machine started, the door opened, and all of the balls immediately fell onto the floor.
In a press release, Massachusetts lottery officials provided further details:
The door on the Mass Cash drawing machine's mixing chamber was inadvertently left open, resulting in numerous balls escaping the chamber prior to the first number being drawn, thus rendering the draw invalid.
Foolish, but at least no one lost out on a million dollars this time.
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