Win millions, get nothing: Players who won big and didn’t get paid

Imagine holding a winning lottery ticket for millions of dollars, walking into the lottery office expecting to collect a giant check, and instead having the clerk look in your eyes and say, “While you do have the winning numbers, you’re not getting paid.”

While that may seem like some kind of strange nightmare, this scenario was all too real for dozens of players who won big jackpots but still couldn’t get paid. From lawsuits to politics, there are dozens of ways you can score a jackpot and still have an empty bank account.

These are true stories of lottery players who had to fight for their money even after they won millions.

Texas lockdown

One of the biggest recent lottery scandals is the Texas Lotto buyout, in which a group known only as Rook TX LLC allegedly purchased every possible combination for the Texas Lotto drawing and won a $95 million jackpot.

It was later revealed that Gary Grief, the Texas Lottery commissioner, may have worked directly with associates of Rook TX to help them guarantee the win. In the fallout, Texas lawmakers abolished its lottery commission, banned all courier services, and limited lottery sales to 100 tickets per transaction. Grief was indicted by a Travis County grand jury on one felony count for his role in the scheme.

However, one Texas woman who had nothing to do with the scandal may have received the harshest penalty of all. Kristen Moriarty won an $83.5 million Texas Lotto jackpot on February 17, 2025, after purchasing $20 worth of tickets from the courier service Jackpocket.

Instead of collecting her prize, though, the lottery commission (which hadn’t been abolished yet) refused to pay her because she had purchased her ticket from a courier service, which was still legal at the time she purchased the tickets.

State regulators tried to justify their denial by claiming that all courier services were under investigation at the time of her win, but they never alleged that Moriarty actually didn’t do anything wrong.

Moriarty responded by suing the lottery commission in May 2025 to receive her rightful prize. The commission responded that they would not pay her until they completed their investigation into the Rook TX, incident.

She pressed her lawsuit, and finally, the commission agreed to pay her her full jackpot. Her lawsuit states:

Every Texan knows what that should mean when it comes to the lottery – if you win, you should get paid. It shouldn’t take a lawsuit to get paid when you win the lottery. But that’s exactly what has happened here.

Game over

When the Indiana Lottery introduced its $5 Space Invaders Cash Invasion instant win tickets, they thought they were bringing some fun and nostalgia to the lottery with a callback to the 1980s arcade classic.

Instead, they caused heartbreak for dozens of Hoosier lottery players who thought they had won big, only to be told their tickets were essentially worthless. The folks at the Indiana lottery offices must have quickly realized something was wrong when just a week after the game’s release, dozens of people flooded their offices claiming they had won thousands of dollars, including at least three who had tickets with $100,000 prizes.

Indiana lottery player Mike Fields told reporters that he bought four scratch-offs and was excited to find that one of his tickets was a $100,000 winner. He took it to the state lottery office and was surprised to see dozens of other players who also thought they had won significant prizes.

Normally, it takes months for all of a game’s top prizes to be found, so with three big winners appearing in a short time, officials realized someone had made a big mistake and suspended the game with a message on the state lottery website reading:

We halted the sales of the ticket to ensure the game experience upholds the integrity we strive to provide.

Officials also halted payouts of all large prizes for the game, although players have the option to file an appeal, and the lottery says it is still investigating exactly what went wrong.

Lottery officials were not specific on why exactly they had printed so many winners. Hoosier Lottery spokesperson Jared Bond said officials “became aware of a technical issue" with the game.

In a second statement to reporters, the Hoosier Lottery said that the displayed winnings on the ticket were "different from what was recorded on the lottery commission’s official validation record."

This is actually the second time the Hoosier Lottery has made a major mistake on an instant-win ticket. In 2022, a different scratch-off game was issued in which every single ticket was a $5,000 winner. In that case, officials agreed to pay everyone who bought a ticket, ultimately paying out $1.7 million.

IOU

In Las Vegas, casinos must comply with very strict rules about maintaining enough cash on hand to cover all the potential bets they take in a given day. Unfortunately, those same rules don’t apply to state governments.

In the summer of 2015, many Illinois Lottery winners felt their joy turn to confusion when they headed to state lottery offices with winning tickets and left with IOUs instead of checks. Due to a legislative impasse at the state capitol, Illinois lawmakers failed to approve a budget for the new fiscal year.

Because state lottery funding comes from the budget, there wasn’t enough money to pay out winners, and anyone who won more than $600 was given an IOU that could be redeemed once the state finally approved the money.

Illinois Lottery spokesperson Steven Rossi told reporters:

The lottery is a state agency like many others, and we’re obviously affected by the budget situation. Since the legal authority is not there for the comptroller to disburse payments, those payments are delayed.

Outraged players sued the lottery to force it to pay them. Two unpaid winners, one with a ticket worth $50,000 and another with a ticket worth $250,000, filed a lawsuit demanding that the state lottery pay all winners with interest and halt sales of all tickets with a prize greater than $25,000 until the state passed a budget.

They argued that the state shouldn’t be allowed to advertise and sell lottery tickets that they couldn’t pay out. In total, 3,900 winners were denied payments worth more than $112 million.

Finally, under pressure from lawsuits and bad polling, the state legislature passed an emergency appropriations bill specifically for lottery players in December of 2015, and all of the winners eventually received their prizes.

However, the damage to the lottery was significant because players lost faith in the game's integrity, and lottery sales fell by over $60 million during the impasse.

Who owns this ticket?

A clerk’s error at a Circle K store in Phoenix, Arizona, led to a big jackpot and an even bigger lawsuit over who actually owns the disputed ticket.

The problem started when a customer came into the store on November 25, 2025, and purchased $65 worth of tickets. However, the clerk made an error and printed out $85 worth of tickets. Under state lottery regulations, the store must pay for all tickets printed, even if they were not sold, which means that technically Circle K owned the extra $25 worth of tickets.

Now here’s the part where things get tricky. After the numbers were drawn for The Pick lottery game that night, Circle K claims that Robert Gawlitza, a manager at the store, realized that one of the extra tickets was a jackpot winner worth $12.8 million.

In a lawsuit, Circle K alleges that Gawlitza clocked out of his shift, went home, changed out of his uniform, came back, and bought a ticket that he already knew was a winner. Gawlitza claims he is the ticket’s rightful owner, and now he and Circle K are making their case before a county judge.

Just to further complicate matters, two more individuals have stepped forward to claim that they are the rightful owners of the winning ticket. The first is Anna Kim, who alleges that she is the player who bought the original $60 worth of tickets. Although she admitted that she didn’t buy the winning ticket, she still claims that it belongs to her.

The second person is Marline Ybarra, a Circle K clerk who claims she sold the ticket to Gawlitza. Why she believes that entitles her to ownership is unclear, but Circle K believes she may have worked with Gawlitza to secure the winning ticket.

As suits and countersuits fly, the ultimate decision on who owns the ticket will be left to the courts, and lottery officials were forced to extend the deadline to claim the prize until all lawsuits are settled.