Lottery commission lacks transparency; blames "glitch" for delay; players frustrated
Update: Lottery Post has prize data published
By Kate Northrop
Some players are still unable to claim winnings from the New York Lottery since they froze prize payouts last Wednesday.
The Lottery has put a hold on prize claims for the Powerball, New York Lotto, Cash4Life, and Take 5 games, blaming the delay on a "glitch."
On Thursday, June 10, the Lottery put out a statement on social media to alert players of the issue.
"There has been a delay in finalizing draw results and prize payments for the following games: Powerball (all tickets) and for the 6/9 draw, New York Lotto, Cash4Life and Take 5," the announcement reads. "Please hold on to your tickets until resolved."
Lottery Post reached out twice for comment but did not receive a response.
However, York State Gaming Commission Director of Communications Brad Maione told Newsday that "all wagers have been recorded properly and all winning patron tickets will be able to be redeemed as soon as the system is fully restored."
Players were understandably more than frustrated that there was little information on the problem to begin with. Many reported that they had reached out to the Lottery for an update or timeline, only to receive a generic response that blames the delay on a software glitch.
Maione explained that the cause of the extensive delay was the "substantial time" it took for Lottery technicians to identify the computer glitch, and that the repair required a slow, methodical restoration of data.
The state had to pause payouts in the first place because the glitch prevented numbers from being verifiable, creating an issue of legitimacy on the state's end, News10NBC reported.
Multiple players on social media were upset with the way the Lottery displayed an error message when scanning tickets, which looked similar to a notification a player receives when their ticket is not deemed a winner. As a result, many players mistakenly threw tickets out that may have held winnings. Some even threatened legal action.
"You are not even listing any prize amounts on Take 5," Facebook user William Dziekanowski told the Lottery. "I have a 2nd prize winner and no info, no way to cash. Not to mention this GLITCH information was not displayed. I threw out a wad of tickets I scanned at a machine and didn't realize it said, 'Results are not in.' It had the same window as 'Sorry not a winner' with the green box and tiny writing. I only realized the day after when the store told me, and I was sure I had a few 3rd prize winners, but just trusted you were on top of your job. This 45-day limit better not come by and you refuse to pay out prizes, I have screen shots and will get a lawyer."
Other players were finding out about the glitch the hard way, with some traveling to casinos and discovering that they were unable to payout prizes.
"I actually went to the casino to find out they weren't doing payouts, a two-hour trip to leave empty handed," Barcley Santos said on social media. "No email of cancellation or anything. But it's weird that drawings are still occurring."
Few players are reporting that the Lottery is gradually rolling out prize payouts for older drawings after some were able to cash tickets Sunday evening.
"I just cashed my Take5 ticket from June 9th..." Donna Lee announced. "But I still couldn't cash my Take5 free plays tickets from June 11th."
According to State Assembly Gaming Committee Chairman Gary Pretlow, payouts are expected to resume within a couple days.
"It's a lot of money, and through an abundance of caution, they didn't want to pay out too little or too much," Pretlow told Newsday.
As the computer system is expected to gradually return to full functionality each day, winning tickets worth less than $600 will be paid out first. Then, winning tickets worth more than $600 will be able to be processed, Lottery officials said.
"We are diligently working to reestablish the New York Lottery prize payments system for tickets," Maione said on Monday afternoon.
UPDATE: Lottery Post has prize data published
As of 2:00 pm Eastern Time Tuesday, Lottery Post has published all of the missing New York Take 5 and Lotto prize amounts for June 9th through the 14th. Players can find the prize information by going to the New York Lottery Results page and using the game links right next to the winning numbers.
That is not good!
Powerball nationwide had a problem last week with their website and took quite some time to fix it; not sure if payouts were a problem too.
It is unacceptable to leave folks, especially lottery players/gamblers in the dark!
Could it be that the NY Lottery has been hacked and they do not want players to know this for fear that trust will be lost?
Why doesn't NY lottery release the results of its "Test Drawings"??? Why can't they tell us how many " Test Drawings" are conducted before the actual drawing? I guess they're afraid we'll have an advantage. It's also possible the people won't be able to differentiate the test result from the actual result.
Agreed; clearly it was New York that caused the delay.
Certainly it is a possibility. The New York Lottery refused to return our repeated calls, so we all have no way of knowing. The lack of transparency is really bad.
Story updated — Lottery Post has published all of the missing prize information starting on June 9th.
Hopefully they do something to make sure that doesn’t happen again.
New York Lottery Website
All Winning Numbers
LOL, weak "any inconvenience" = one week of frozen payments with no explanation.
Who cares anyway? It's not like the New York lottery has ever sold a losing ticket anyway.
Well I had a little bit of a panic last week when I went to cash a Take 5 ticket with 4 winning #s and the clerk, who didn't speak very good English, acted like he had no idea what was wrong with my ticket. Scanning stated that there was no record of my ticket.
Wasn't until I did research when I got home that I found out there was this 'glitch' and to hang on to my ticket.
Good thing you researched. Wonder how many people just tossed their tickets that were winners.
A side note, I keep all my losing tickets, and every few months I will double check them. Also, should I be lucky enough to have a win big enough to have to pay taxes those losing tickets will help offset the taxes.
Probably chump change to NY State AG to investigate this. They have enough on their plates right now with djt!!
A state run by liberals................
.............Nothing to see here folks.. It's all under control...
Have a nice day
I smell hanky panky going on at the NYS Lottery commission. Not only was there a delay in the winner stats, the locations of those places that won the winning tickets as usually posted isnt there on the website in the breakdowns.
LOL, no truer words have ever been spoken
DJT is not even in office, he's not the problem, Cuomo is, he's governor of NY, not DJT, havent you heard???
"Could it be that the NY Lottery has been hacked"
Whatever happened I can't imagine what it could be that normal people would call "a glitch". I've got to figure that whatever it was it took out their entire system for validating tickets, and they couldn't just turn it off and back on.
"the repair required a slow, methodical restoration of data"
So the "glitch" destroyed or corrupted primary data storage and all back up data storage? Again, that doesn't sound like anything I'd call a glitch. It sounds like major data recovery of the sort that requires recovery of something like formatted or physically damaged disks. Regardless of the cause, it sounds to me like a very serious problem/malfunction.
" and they do not want players to know this for fear that trust will be lost?"
What could they tell people that would be worse than taking nearly a week to fix a problem that prevented them from confirming players' winning tickets and paying out the prizes?
FWIW, the NY lottery website still isn't listing the breakdown for the 6/9 PB drawing. Also the Lotto jackpot for 6/12 didn't increase at all from the 6/9 drawing, despite the prize breakdown indicating that they sold about as many tickets as they did for the last few drawings that had increases of $300k.
What could they tell people that would be worse than taking nearly a week to fix a problem that prevented them from confirming players' winning tickets and paying out the prizes?
“When it comes to legalized bank robbing, We are the best, "New York State Lottery.” Oops i mean, Floyd Mayweather
a quick heist needed to be done lol
Could it be mere incompetence? The lottery display screens in the stores are indicating that the Take5 drawing is going to 2x per day with 2:30 and 10:30 drawings daily (from the current 10;30 p.m. drawing solely). Perhaps the required software changes were wrong and screwed up the whole system. If true, I'm suprised that they could not simply revert back to the prior system until all bugs were worked out in the new system. Can't make this stuff up.
I have no idea how incompetent the lottery's IT security or IT design/management might be, but I can't imagine what would cause a problem with all of the data for multiple games other than a deliberate attack unless there was major incompetence starting with the design and implementation of data storage. Not many people did it with their home PCs before the cloud came along, but important data should be backed up in multiple locations. That means different buildings, not different hard drives that could all be damaged by the same fire/earthquake/volcano/whatever. It should also be really difficult to delete the back up data.
"Perhaps the required software changes were wrong"
I don't see any reason that adding another drawing should be at all difficult. The computer doesn't understand that Monday and Tuesday are different days, and won't understand that Monday1 and Monday2 are the same day. I'd figure it's a little bit like starting a new thread right here on LP. The system is already designed for adding drawings and keeping track. Besides, the system for selling tickets should be as independent from the record keeping system as possible. The selling system needs to get validation from the recording system, but I don't see a problem on the selling side causing a problem on the recording side. I definitely can't understand how a selling system could corrupt data for multiple games.
That said, it's impossible to make something completely foolproof and very possible to come up with a better fool, including the fool who's supposed to design the (almost) foolproof system. Still, I've got to figure hope that it's really difficult to accidentally corrupt all of the data about one individual game drawing, let alone multiple ones.