Pa. clerk stole $48K in lottery tickets
A woman faces a preliminary hearing on charges she stole $48,000 worth of instant-win Pennsylvania lottery tickets from the convenience store where she worked.
Online court records do not list an attorney for 39-year-old Diane Justi, of Freedom.
Police in Conway say Justi stole the tickets while working at the Conway Superette between April and September.
Police say one of the store's owners alerted them to the thefts. Police say store surveillance tapes clearly showed Justi stealing th ...
Nov 17, 2009, 8:27 am - - Lottery News forum
Police arrest four in Chicago lottery ticket scam
Police arrested two men and two women earlier this week who allegedly ran a lottery ticket scam that targeted elderly Hispanic victims.
The four worked as a team and typically sought out elderly Hispanic victims at stores and on the street, according to a release from the Chicago Police.
The suspects would approach a victim two at a time and explain they were illegal immigrants and had a winning lottery ticket of more than one million dollars. They would then offer to share the winnings if ...
Nov 8, 2009, 8:53 am - - Lottery News forum
Arkansas woman tries to cash in fake lottery ticket, arrested
A woman is arrested inside the Arkansas Lottery Headquarters Monday afternoon, and the local media's cameras were there for the arrest.
Police say Ruth Dennis, 56, tried to pass a fake winning ticket for the real thing at the claims center. Her friend, John Burch says he gave Dennis and her sister a ride from Camden with a $3,000 ticket.
Lottery director Ernie Passailaigue says the ticket was clearly not real. He says she used the three times lucky scratch tickets and allegedly cut and pas ...
Oct 19, 2009, 7:56 pm - - Lottery News forum
Lottery hoax causes riot at Ohio coat store
Updated with new video report
Oct. 15, 2009, 1:27 p.m.
A woman being driven around in a rented limousine pulled up at a coat store and announced she'd won the lottery and would pay for everyone's purchases, police said, but she ended up causing a riot when customers realized it was a hoax.
Angry customers threw merchandise around and looted, leaving the store looking as though a hurricane had passed through it, police said.
Linda Brown was arrested Tuesday after an hours-long shoppin ...
Oct 15, 2009, 10:12 am - - Lottery News forum
Convicted embezzler to forfeit Kansas Lottery prize
Paul W. Lyle learned that he won the grand prize in a Kansas Lottery second-chance drawing at his preliminary hearing 11 days ago. Trouble was: The former radio executive was facing a charge of felony theft for embezzling a reported $87,750 from his employer, American Media Investments, which owns three radio stations in Pittsburg, five in Joplin, Mo., and five more in Texas.
The supreme irony: Lyle, 63, the company's chief operating officer until the theft was discovered in May, confessed th ...
Oct 3, 2009, 11:36 am - - Lottery News forum
Lottery winner picks up check, then gets arrested
$4.4M lotto winner goes straight to jail
It was a good news, bad news day for Barry Shell.
The good news: he won more than $4 million. The bad news: he ended up in jail.
Shell, from Brampton, Ontario, picked up a check for $4,377,298, the top prize in the July 18 draw for the Lotto 6/49.
I went to the store and checked my ticket on the self-serve ticket checker, Shell was quoted as saying in a news release from the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation.
As soon as I saw how muc ...
Jul 22, 2009, 8:57 pm - - Lottery News forum
$25M lottery scam aimed at elderly busted
The feds on Tuesday dismantled an Israeli boiler-room operation that conned elderly U.S. victims out of $25 million by telling them they'd won a sweepstakes lottery.
A dozen members of the international telemarketing ring were named in a three-count fraud indictment handed up yesterday in Manhattan Federal Court.
Prosecutors say ring members bought more than 185,000 names from U.S.-based brokers to find victims to dupe into turning over hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to claim the ...
Jul 22, 2009, 6:51 pm - - Lottery News forum
Lottery winners broke, busted
For someone who struck it rich, William Rivenburgh had fairly modest plans about how to spend his lottery winnings three years ago:
Pay off debts, make home repairs and possibly take a family trip to Disney World. Whether any of those things happened is unclear.
What is clear is that the money Rivenburgh has gotten so far from the $1 million scratch-off ticket he won in 2006 seems to have evaporated. He doesn't have enough money to make $5,000 bail after he was arrested May 25 for alleged ...
Jun 25, 2009, 12:57 am - - Lottery News forum
Feds freeze online poker champ's winnings
Federal officials order banks to freeze millions in online poker winnings
On the Sunday before Memorial Day, David made the big time.
Winning $10,000 in an online poker tournament made him eligible for the upcoming World Series of Poker, the game's premier event, where hundreds of players amateur and professional descend on Las Vegas from around the world to play for a multimillion-dollar pot.
To register, he simply had to cash a check cut by a company that processed payments for the po ...
Jun 11, 2009, 11:20 pm - - Lottery News forum
Online poker group says gov't seized $30M in player payouts
In the latest skirmish in the battle over Internet gambling, online poker advocates say the government has frozen more than $30 million in payouts affecting thousands of players.
The Poker Players Alliance released a statement Tuesday claiming that the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York instructed four banks to freeze accounts belonging to online payment processors. John Pappas, the group's executive director, claims the frozen accounts contain funds owed to 27,000 players wh ...
Jun 10, 2009, 7:45 pm - - Lottery News forum
