Three people redeemed a fraudulent Hoosier Lottery ticket worth $2 million, buying a home and several vehicles with the money before police caught on to the scam, court documents allege.
Marion County Prosecutor Terry Curry announced in a news conference Thursday that two men and a woman — all relatives — are facing 15 criminal counts in connection with a lottery fraud scheme that raked in more than $1.1 million.
Ashlee Parsley, Jackie Parsley II and Joseph Parsley face theft, forgery and money laundering charges, after Ashlee Parsley in October redeemed a ticket that prosecutors allege was stolen from a Plainfield liquor store, then called Parsley's Liquor. It was owned at the time by the estate of a relative of Jackie and Joseph Parsley.
It's a scheme police and lottery officials said they see from time to time: Employees of liquor stores and convenience stores will steal lottery tickets and cash in small winnings.
But fraud related to winnings this large is rarer, Hoosier Lottery chief of staff Carrie Stroud said.
"This is relatively unusual," Stroud said at the news conference.
Court documents say Ashlee Parsley, then the fiancee of Joseph Parsley, redeemed the ticket, telling officials she purchased it at Parsley's Liquor on Oct. 1.
Investigators reviewed video surveillance of the store and determined that she did not buy a ticket at that time, a probable cause affidavit says.
Instead, court documents say, video indicated that Jackie Parsely took the winning ticket and activated it at Parsley's Liquor, where the lottery terminal had been recently reactivated.
Because the family was planning to sell the store, they did not renew their license to sell lottery tickets, and the terminal went inactive, court documents say. But Jackie Parsley asked the Hoosier Lottery to reactivate the terminal shortly before the ticket was redeemed, documents say.
Indiana law also prohibits family members from purchasing lottery tickets at stores owned by relatives.
At the time, the store, at 1731 East Main St., was owned by the estate of a deceased relative of the Parsley's, but the store was later sold.
Police and the Hoosier Lottery began investigating, when an executor of the estate of the former owner grew concerned when he learned Ashlee Parsley had redeemed a winning ticket from the store.
By that time, the group had spent a portion of their winnings on several trucks and an SUV, as well as on a house at Heritage Lake in Putnam County.
Investigators have seized the assets and frozen the accounts, Curry said.
The charges came from a joint investigation launched in November by the Hoosier Lottery Security Division and the Marion County Prosecutor's Office's Grand Jury Division.
In 2008, former Hoosier Lottery security official William C. Foreman was found guilty of theft for leaking the location of a $1 million scratch-off winner four years earlier at Otter's Grocery in Cross Plains, in southeastern Indiana. Chad R. Adkins and Daniel J.Foltz bought the store's cache of the $20 tickets, about $700 worth, investigators said.
When the men claimed the prize, the security chief recognized Adkins as Foreman's friend.
Foreman resigned in September 2004 rather than take a lie detector test. Adkins andFoltz pleaded guilty to theft and agreed to testify against Foreman in exchange for suspended sentences. Foreman was sentenced in 2008 to eight years home detention.
Here is the breakdown of charges in the Plainfield case: Jackie Parsley II, Ashlee Parsley and Joseph Parsley have been charged with corrupt business influence, a felony; false passing of a lottery ticket, a felony; and theft, forgery and money laundering, all felonies, the news release said. Ashlee Parsley also has been charged with perjury, a felony, and Jackie Parsley has been charged with unauthorized purchase of a lottery ticket by a retailer, a misdemeanor.
The three defendants are in custody elsewhere, Curry said, and an initial hearing will be set in Marion County, once they have been transferred to the Marion County Jail.
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Thanks to truesee for the tip.
I just love these knuckleheads.
Oh Ashlee..You gotta love those Orange Jumpsuits..
Parts of this story are confusing or read "stupid" to me in relation to the people that were arrested.
This part ...
"Because the family was planning to sell the store, they did not renew their license to sell lottery tickets, and the terminal went inactive, court documents say. But Jackie Parsley asked the Hoosier Lottery to reactivate the terminal shortly before the ticket was redeemed, documents say."
Why not take the ticket to another place to cash? ... so they wanted the terminal to be reactivated just to cash a winner ... would this request not attract unwanted attention for this one ticket being processed?
The executor of the estate would have an interest in "anything" occurring on the property or within the store.
If they had cashed the ticket in another town perhaps it would have had a better chance of working. The ticket was "activated" so it OK in that respect.
It's possible they discovered the winning ticket after the terminal was no longer active but needed it to be active again since the ticket was part of a book registered to that store or location.
I don't know, it all seems a bit confusing to me.
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Avaritia facit bardus
- Greed makes you stupid >>>>>
And how bout's the legitimate patrons who were robbed of their opportunity to buy this winning ticket?
Fortes Fortuna Juvat
Eddessa_Knight
LOL
The family that "preys" together, stays together...in county !
they look pretty spiffy in those jump suits. I hope they send them away for a long long time. We need huge penalties for CHEATERS !!!
"Why not take the ticket to another place to cash?"
The only place you cash a ticket that big is at a lottery office. I'm assuming that it was a scratcher that had to be activated by the lottery retailer it was sent to in order to sell it. Because the owner died and the store was closed there was a bunch of unsold stock, including lottery tickets. Depending on how the lottery actually charges retailers for lottery tickets the unactivated ticket still belonged to the lottery and the store didn't have to pay for it, or it belonged to the estate of the dead store owner and the estate could continue to sell them or return them for a refund.
Well they weren't the sharpest knives in the drawer.
That's true ... I didn't think about a large winning lottery ticket would have to taken to lottery headquarters.
It seems to me that they must have been back in the store without the executor's knowledge going through all the tickets and came across this large winner ... there must have also been other small winning tickets that could be cashed at other places ... $20, $50, $100 and so forth.
They asked for the terminal to be reactivated ... probably without the executor knowing about it. I would think there would be no money left laying around to cash any lottery tickets ... the executor would have had it secured for the estate, perhaps into a bank account.
I don't know, it still seems very strange ... the lottery reactivating a terminal without checking with the executor ... unless they were not aware the owner had died.
A lot of questions ...
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If I have this right, but for the executor, they would never have been found out? I don't think the Parsleys were the dingbats, here. I think that honor belongs to the lottery commission. A previously deactivated terminal has a reactivation request right before a $2 million ticket gets redeemed? Okay, maybe the lottery chose to overlook one suspicious event. But how about the surname of the winner matching the name of the store? How do two suspicious "coincidences" not get looked into?
If the lottery was lackadaisical enough on their own standards to hand the Parsleys a million bucks without a modicum of effort made to check out the story then they don't deserve to have the money recouped. Let Ashlee spend it on more hair dye and zit cream.
OK..why was the ticket fraudulent? Because they owned the store and cashed in a winning ticket from the store? Are cashiers and store owners able to somehow figure out which tickets are winners? I know I heard of cashiers determining winning tickets by using a needle or pin and making a straight line over the barcode then scanning. The winning tickets they keep and the losing tickets they put back and those purchasing tickets cant see that there is a straight line across barcode.
I also read a story on this site that a security employee at a lottery headquarters told one of his relatives where a winning ticket was located. The relative went to that location bought every ticket in the roll and cashed in on the winning ticket. All of this makes me skeptical of buying scratch offs. Also in a small town in south Ga a gentleman recently won 3 million on a scratch off and the ticket was purchased at his father's store. I thought..hmm what a coincidence.
Has anyone else heard of different scams retailers or using to determine winning tickets?
In my earlier post ... I was just assuming they had decided to get back into the store to check all the remaining lottery tickets for any winners. I don't see how they could know there was a big winner in one of those books but they got lucky and scratched one off ... well, they thought they were lucky at that point.
I guess the lottery hadn't come yet to remove the terminal and tickets.
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Greed, is something . This stack of twenty tickets they steal had exact 15 tickets missing out of it. A complete stack is 50 ticket. Had it been a full stack , another charge of Grand Theft, would been add to this list. I can't wait to see what happen in this case.