$70,000 In Prize Money Stolen Technicians Printed Bogus Tickets, Investigators Allege

Washington Post ^ | December 23, 2007 | Brian Krebs

[3AngelaD]

D.C. officials were told last year that lax enforcement of security procedures made it possible for a handful of contract employees to steal tens of thousands of dollars in lottery tickets and prize money, according to records released this week in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed with the D.C. Lottery and Charitable Games Control Board. An investigation conducted by Battelle Memorial Institute in August 2006 determined that the ticket thefts were most likely committed by field service technicians employed by Lottery Technology Enterprises...

Lottery officials learned of questionable ticket sales in December 2005, when several District retail locations began complaining about unauthorized ticket sales charged to their accounts. In each case, the sales were recorded as occurring after the retailers' business hours. Surveillance footage and audits of ticket stock showed that no one was at the retailers' lottery terminals when the tickets were supposedly sold.

Battelle concluded that LTE technicians probably created the unauthorized tickets by manipulating radio communications technology that is used to transmit ticket purchases from retail terminals to the D.C. Lottery's central system....In about 5,600 transactions, the perpetrators made it appear as if purchases had been made at one of more than three dozen lottery terminals at authorized locations. All told, the perpetrators created $86,000 in phantom numbers...

Jay Young, chief operating officer for the D.C. Lottery, said the board worked with the FBI to identify at least three LTE employees suspected of committing the fraud. The company later fired the workers, but investigators did not have enough evidence of wrongdoing to bring criminal charges.... The D.C. Lottery retailers affected by the scam were never told how the thefts were carried out...

[3AngelaD]

So they wait until the Sunday before Christmas to report this. Like everything else DC does, this is screwed up.And no one was ever charged! I do not gamble, and I think lotteries are a tax on the poor, but this is just one more sign of incompetence in the DC government.

[RDTF]

gotta love it

[Doogle]

Lottery officials learned of questionable ticket sales in December 2005...

..Hope all those lottery players held those losing tickets they have...as evidence that they participated in a rigged lottery that the DC people knew about..

[ccmay]

I think lotteries are a tax on the poor

Lotteries are a tax on the stupid, not the poor, but certainly there is lot of overlap.

[KTM rider]

Here in California, they sold the Lottery to the voters on the premise that the money collected would go to the schools.

the California treasury has been stealing it ever since,

[Don Corleone]

If ANYBODY in the District of Columbia ever does anything LEGAL it will be the end of the world as we know it.

[bmwcyle]

They steal every thing they get their hands on. No one has gone to jail for the millions taken from Metro parking yet. It is time to clean that hole out.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Lotteries are a tax on the stupid, not the poor, but certainly there is lot of overlap correlation.

There, fixed it.

[logic]

I think lotteries are a tax on the poor,

Lotteries are a tax on the stupid not the poor...