State lawmakers from both political parties are calling for an investigation of how the Illinois Lottery managed scratch-off games in response to a report showing the lottery didn't award many of the biggest prizes in the biggest games.
"I just don't think we should promise people things we don't deliver," said state Rep. Lou Lang, D-Skokie. "And if we say we have a game that's going to pay X and it doesn't pay X, then we've lied to the people who bought the tickets."
Lang was joined by state Sen. Terry Link, D-Waukegan, state Rep. Scott Drury, D-Highwood, and state Rep. David McSweeney, R- Barrington Hills, in calling for legislative hearings after the investigation was published Friday.
(See Investigation: Illinois Lottery didn't award 40% of scratch-off grand prizes, Lottery Post, Dec. 9, 2016.)
Illinois handed over management of its lottery in mid-2011 to a private firm, Northstar Lottery Group, and the Tribune studied the 17 biggest-prize instant games that were begun and ended in the five years since.
Reporters found most of those games did not award all of their grand prizes and some did not award any. In all, those games awarded less than 60 percent of their grand prizes — a rate lower than other states studied by the Tribune, and lower than when Illinois managed its own lottery. The Tribune also found that, because of how the games ended, the lottery often paid a lower percentage of revenue than the games were designed to pay.
One $30-a-ticket game, for example, pitched the biggest instant grand prize in Illinois history: $46 million in periodic payments. But it was pulled from store shelves before it awarded either of its two grand prizes. Its designed payout rate — nearly 78 percent of sales — ended at 61 percent of sales. Had it paid out at its designed rate, players would have won an additional $10 million, the Tribune found.
McSweeney said hearings would provide players "a full explanation of what happened."
"The bottom line: It's for the integrity of the games," he said.
The Tribune found that under Northstar the number of tickets printed for games dramatically increased, allowing the lottery to offer bigger and better prizes for games. That helped entice players to buy more instant tickets than ever. But as sales dropped in many games, Northstar pushed to end those games' ticket sales before all, or sometimes any, of the grand prizes were awarded.
Other states told the Tribune they typically print only as many tickets as they reasonably believe they can sell in a game to be able to award all the grand prizes. Neither Northstar nor the state provided the Tribune sales forecasts showing how many tickets they expected to sell for those 17 games.
Drury said he hopes hearings will better determine Northstar's intent in printing so many tickets.
"When these games were ended early, what was the motive behind that and what was the intent?" he said. "Was there any intent at the times that the games were developed to end them early? Because, if so, that is extremely problematic."
Northstar is owned by two longtime vendors who continued to do work for the lottery, International Game Technology and Scientific Games. The firms were paid more from the increased sales. But they pointed out the state made more money, too, and the firms told the Tribune that they acted only in the best interest of players and the state by replacing lower-performing games with more popular ones.
The firms said that even if all grand prizes were not awarded in games, the odds of winning were the same for each individual ticket.
Scientific Games said it welcomed any state review of its performance as a vendor and partner firm of Northstar.
"Scientific Games has served the State of Illinois for more than 40 years, generating billions of dollars for its citizens," company spokeswoman Susan Cartwright said in a written statement Monday. "Scientific Games encourages any review by the responsible public officials of state-regulated gaming operations and pledges its full cooperation with any review."
Officials from IGT could not be reached for comment.
A lottery spokesman declined to address calls for hearings but referred the Tribune to its previous statement that the agency is committed to running the games fairly and transparently.
In written statements, House GOP leader Jim Durkin, of Western Springs, and Senate Republican leader Christine Radogno, of Lemont, did not call for hearings. Rather, they said they had faith in Gov. Bruce Rauner's administration, as it works to replace Northstar, to address what Durkin called "very troubling" issues raised by the Tribune.
"The integrity of the Illinois Lottery, at all times, must be maintained to the highest level," Durkin said.
Link said a thorough state investigation was "long overdue" about Northstar's tenure, considering the years of bitter arguments between the state and Northstar over Northstar missing the profit targets it pitched in its bid to win the management deal. Both the Quinn and Rauner administrations pushed to end the deal, with the Rauner administration inking a deal with Northstar to replace it as early as next year.
"My client is the state of Illinois," Link said. "I want to make sure that we're getting the money we're supposed to be getting, and those people that are playing are getting what they deserve and really do have a chance of winning."
Lang said he did not have enough information to say whether anything "nefarious" happened, but wanted to track who made the decisions, why and where the money went.
"We do need to account for when somebody buys a lottery ticket and thinks they have a shot to win $1 million, that they have a shot of winning $1 million," he said.
This is why I rarely play scratchers. You don't know if or when the top prizes have been distributed. I think most states close games before all the top prizes have been claimed.
In Texas, they are getting ready to close a $5 game that started with 14 $100,000 top prizes, and there are still 7 of those top prizes unclaimed. Did they even release all the cards with top prizes? Who knows. The game was brought out in July. That's just wrong.
A scratch game should never be pulled until every possible prize has been paid out. Anything less is just fraud.
People have to be crazy to buy lottery tickets in Illinois!
Your point has a lot of merit. With no accountability disclosure, anyone who plays scratch offs is at the mercy of the state that runs it. I have reviewed many top prize payouts and have seen that many scratch off games still have a large number of top prizes that haven't been won and this mind you is from games that started back in 2014.
I personally won't waste money on scratch offs period.
"People have to be crazy to buy lottery tickets in Illinois!"
Without a doubt!
.
Though I wish there were more comments up to this point, I do appreciate what I've read about
the state(s) pulling the game, before all big prizes have been paid out.
I can count on both of my hands how many scratch-off tickets I've ever purchased.
Don't buy any tickets because this company running the lottery , ripping
off the people off ........and keeping the millions of dollars .....
What happen to Illinois schools not receiving $$$$ ...
More likely someone putting $$$$ in their pockets !!!!
Al Capone's grandson must be running the Illinois Lottery! Why you cheatin' $cumb@g$! We knew Chicago was the most corrupt city in America, now the WHOLE state might have joined in on the fun too!
Any entity not planning on paying action that they booked should not be allowed to book any action at all.
"Officials from IGT could not be reached for comment.".....................................let me put on my shocked face
............And after that investigation is complete up there, they need to come to NC and do the same with our instant and draw games. I keep waiting for the day the Dept of Justice comes to investigate Alice and her Minions with orange prison jumpsuits in tow!
"The firms said that even if all grand prizes were not awarded in games, the odds of winning were the same for each individual ticket."
Huh?
What about for the games where no grand prizes were issued?
The odds were ZERO chance in those cases...
Your odds depend on the tickets that are in stores and can actually be bought, not whether or not anybody buys a ticket with a particular prize. If it's no different than your odds if you bought a ticket for last Saturday's PB. Just because nobody won the jackpot doesn't mean your ticket didn't have the usual odds of winning.
The potential problem here is that the tickets that were distributed to stores may not have represented the advertised odds. If nobody won a grand prize because no grand prize winning tickets were ever available in stores even though the total number of available tickets was high enough there's a problem. OTOH, if only 1 in 5 million tickets is a grand prize winner and only 250 or 500 thousand tickets ever made it to stores then that's just the luck of the draw.
If it turns out that there was an intent to not distribute tickets randomly or a game that was selling reasonably well was stopped while the state had an advantage that was significantly higher than the game odds should have given it then there's clearly problem. If a game just turns out to be a dud with low sales then it's perfectly reasonable to pull the plug, but if the state is way ahead of the odds the extra money should be made available by some other means.
OMG! Exactly! Thinking the same thing. Where is the logic in their comment?!!! I mean, suppose nothin' from nothin' = nothin', so yeah, guess = same odds for all players! Nothin'!
Today is a sad day for illinios state lottery. First and formost if you win they don't pay or give you i owe you and now they coming up with better tricks not to let anyone hit big . Wow did you guys in illinios just employ mr Patel another idea only him can come up with. Here is the problem the game designer got paid big based on sales, the state got paid big profit based on sales but the player had no chance of winning the jackpot in the first place because the game ended before any big win .And this happened so many times like this WOW. even in a roullette game Red Or Black 50/50 .But in this illinios scratch games like zero/50. Why is this happening to illinios the players deserve better and the state reputation deserve better. When a state that doean't pay winners of $250,000 instead promise i owe you introduces a game for $46million win that is a red flag too good to be true . why didn't they break it down to one million 46 tickets this way even if game ends they would have paid $26million or 26 people and this publicity will help sell more but insstead they kept the $46 million in their warehouse shelf and sold public junk.
The sad part of all this is that the pick3 games and pick4 games are all computerized draw and they expect the public to believe they are using reasonable judgement. Am very sure i won't scratch in illinios any more because at this point you are better off scratching your Butt lol
They are beginning to make the iowa lottery security thief and the tipton family look good . Really sad
I think it should become a law, in all countries, that an instant game can't be closed/canceled until at least 1 of its grand prizes has been redeemed/claimed!
I quoted from the article:
"The firms said that even if all grand prizes were not awarded in games, the odds of winning were the same for each individual ticket."
What jerks. While we care about odds, we care about honesty and the amounts being what they are claimed for all the tickets printed and sold as should be for the benefit of the game and the players that hope with the real odds of winning a big one.
Are these sleaze-bags really trying to justify their cheating scratch-off buyers with THAT comment, about the odds being the same regardless?!
They can't really think people that buy scratch-offs are that stupid?! Send these "firms" to prison.
Calif is suppose to pull the game after the last top prize is sold. However, they use to award one top prize after the game was pulled via second chance entry. The problem was that in one of their $5 million dollar scratchers, one top prize went unclaimed for 2 years. Finally, they just pulled it and had the second chance drawing. I was okay with that.
I'm so glad that people are starting to catch on. If you want some insight in how this is pulled off I can tell you how they accomplish this in Indiana which is just as corrupt as Illinois is.
The part of the scheme that everyone is missing is the "new games" and ticket distribution methods. How they are able to accomplish their so called "Low performance" sales numbers is that they target an abundant amount of new tickets for release to purposely pull tickets from distribution to artificially decrease sales to a point they are allowed to by state by laws pull a game from it's production or release.
Some not so well known info about lottery tickets that will help you paint of picture of rampant corruption and corporate greed.
State Lotteries are allowed to do what is called "Lottery Pooling". They are allowed to take the tickets from the distributor and arrange them in a way that guarantees them profit. AKA they take a ticket distribution and it has 5 top prizes. They are allowed to create 5 prize pools and typically they sell from the front of one section to the end of it always releasing the top prize when enough money has been collected on their side to pay for said top prize. What state lotteries have adapted too is quite frightening. They have started selling into multiple prize pools which creates the skew on number of tickets remaining and top prizes remaining. The state lotteries are allowed to virtually print money and have free reign to distribute the tickets as they seem fit. There is no randomness to this as it's taken out by the state lotteries to ensure their profits and goals are met. So how does this fit into the scheme of Illinois, Indiana etc...?
This fits into the scheme by the sales distribution methods. Indiana will do and is doing the same thing that was done in the Illinois thread and sell into a massive prize pool. Once they have sold around 1/2 the tickets and 2/3 top prizes remain they will release a ticket that competes with the ticket on a display. AKA Indiana released a 25 dollar ticket and sold around 51% of the tickets. Before the game was closed 1 top prize was claimed right before this was done and then Indiana released another 25 dollar ticket that competed with the older 25 dollar ticket on the display counters. Most gas station can hold 12-30 different types of tickets, so they aren't going to carry 2 different 25 dollar tickets. By releasing like tickets with the same dollar amounts they will pull those tickets from the display which decreases the sales of the games drastically. This in turn is used to make the excuse that sales have dropped below a certain point on this game, so we can say it's not doing so hot lets close it. This allows them to presale into prize pools and sell proportionally increase their revenue. If you want to know if your state is corrupt go look at games closed for a state. Look at the percentage tickets remaining vs. top prizes remaining and you'll see a common theme. The state lotteries mostly ran by IGT etc.. are using this practice to increase their revenue to meet these increasing revenue margins that are impossible, because what they are doing is counter intuitive and the reverse of what you would want to do to increase margins and grow a healthy lottery. They are robbing the people short term at the cost of long term growth. If you want proof of this please PM me and we can look at the state lotteries and do the math. If scratch offs were truly random the state would have a chance of losing money and I can tell you it's completely rigged in their favor. The problem is they've gotten a little too greedy and people are starting to catch on.
The reason why IGT released the statement that mathematically everyone had the same chance is that it's not a lie, however when you incorporate info into the fact they know exactly where the top prize is in the back of the prize pool it is a lie and they know exactly what they are doing when it comes to closing games early and making bigger profits. The lack of transparency at a government level is very concerning as they've turned a blind eye likely due to the fact the check they are receiving is so large. However, I've seen enough and I want to educate everyone on the thievery that is going on.
1) I wonder, what effect if any is this scandal going to have on further ticket sales?
2) will anyone besides an escape goat be held accountable for any of this?
I used to avoid scratch-off games until I noticed the "$10K per Week for Life" game had been in play for over a year with majority of the top prize tickets still in play. So I started scooping them up with my discretionary income wherever I could find them. That is when I saw the trend of Northstar starting to pull the tickets out of retail stores. At first, I just thought they were pulling them out of slower selling locations and redistributing back into higher traffic locations that also had the vending machines. But a few stops at the various tollway plazas confirmed that not to be the case. I did win a few hundred dollars on several tickets but the thought that they would pull the game before all of the top prizes were claimed just rubbed me the wrong way. That is also in contradiction to how the Illinois lottery used to only pull games once all top prizes were claimed. The final nail in the coffin of me buying scratch-offs was reading that the first $30k per week top prize was sold from the vending machine at the Springfield lottery headquarters location. Can you say that smells awfully fishy...Asian Carp-style fishy!?
?
Your last sentence makes no sense and is clearly false as no 30k a week prizes were ever awarded. Its one of the main points of the investigation as potentially the most high profile of games in which no grand prizes were paid out despite all the $ spent and amount of tickets purchased
Good point. Closing a game before any top prizes were paid out implies there ws never any intention of paying the top prizes.
I meant $10K For Life. The very first $10K For Life top prize was purchased from Springfield HQ vending machine. And then they pulled the game...fishy!
In 2005 Massachusetts released a scratcher called Texas Hold Em where 560 randomly selected prize winners would be selected to play a virtual poker game for $10 million. The scratcher fell out of favor and by 2012 only 501 people had been randomly selected and four had died. The virtual poker game was finally held in 2013, won by Eugene Condon, Jr.
Back in 2005, a Lottery Post poster said that it was nearly impossible to tell if you won the game. He had to pull his scratcher out of the trash to double check that it was a loser, and he was a poker player. Other people went to the lottery office to claim their prize, only to be told they had a loser.
First lawsuit has now come (3 players + store in Fairview Heights) seeking class action status alleging fraud , etc
Also when Illinois ran its lotto the grand prizes in games were awarded 87.5% of time. Under Northstar that dropped to 59.6% and its alleged that was so Northstar could maximize profits by pulling games early
Will be interesting to watch and this lawsuit and other potential lawsuits could open door to an actual investigation by state in Northstars conduct