I actually called lottery and spoke to the legal department and they were extremely helpful. This is what happened. Game 596 1 million dollar a year for life has less than 1 million tickets out in the retailers store. With their formulas they can ascertain that by August 11, 2016 the million or so tickets out there will all be sold out so that is how they came up with the August 11, 2016 end of cashing tickets date. Technically the end of game has not been called they are just projecting this. They cannot call the end of date until the last top prize winner comes forward.
There are no more tickets in the warehouse, they are all out there in the retailers. Retailers can no longer request this game to sell but can sell whatever they have left until the game is called to an end and that requires the last top prize ticket to be validated by lotto. The ticket cannot just be sold it must have been validated as a winning ticket by either a retailer or lotto themselves.
So now I proposed this question. What if the ticket was destroyed. You may or may not know that when a retailer goes out of business, sells their businesses, goes bankrupt, or has a fire or water damage ALL opened books of scratch offs that the retailer has opened gets destroyed. ONLY closed books get returned. ALSO what I did not know is that when a retailer opens the book example game 596 1 million dollars a year FOR LIFE, they have 45 days to pay lottery for the open book sold or not and make their money back once the book is sold. So if the retailer has the book for 6 months and they are tired of waiting to get their money back they can send in the unsold portions and they get destroyed also. ALSO tickets get robbed everyday they also get destroyed. At last foil request destroyed tickets for this game was over 300,000 thousand.
So what if the winning ticket was in the destroyed or stolen tickets. They told me legally there is nothing they can do. They have to report out that their is 1 winning ticket left until th last of th tickets are sold. That is not fair because it really is fraud for knowing selling the game when the ticket was destroyed.
So I asked why tickets have to get destroyed they told m that the book keeping is too complicated to remove tickets from on location to another location. So I asked if they could allow the lottery agency themselves to sell them through their own locations they told me there was no way. They told me that it is in the NYS Legislative law and only by action of the NYS legislative body could they do something about the tickets that ht destroyed otherwise thy have to destroy them according to the law. To me this is fraud because I have played this game since its inception in 2008 and followed it very closely. We could be on a wild goose chase because th ticket could have been destroyed.
Now I want to also say that there was a dry spell 2008 and 2009 each had a winner. but the rest of 2009, 2010 and 2011 and almost all of 2012 went without a winner and than we had a winner 12-2012, than 2013 and 2014. So for almost 3 whole years there was no winning ticket which for me means that that was when th ticket got destroyed. Will we ever know I am not sure if they have to reveal this after the game is over but I am going to ask anyway.
This game made a hell of a lot of money for them and was probably their best game ever and they may not have to pay the final 6th winner which means it was a win win all the way around.
A lot to take in but all true.