I called NYS lottery today and first called legal and than was told to speak to someone higher up and they were nice enough to transfer me to an acting commissioner of one of the departments. I am not going to say his name but I did verify he status after the call and checked it with the lottery list of employees and he was a very high level executive. So here goes
I asked him what he thought about the last winning ticket left in the $30 1 million dollars a year for life scratch off. I asked him what the likely hood of that ticket being destroyed would have on the game. He said that he felt that the odds of the ticket being out there was good but not assured. He stated that they do not know what book has the ticket and they do not know if the ticket gets destroyed because they do not keep track of that. He said that if they know which books had the winning tickets it would compromise the integrity of the game. He said that they would not know if that ticket was destroyed if all tickets were sold because they do not know the actual ticket number of th winning ticket. They have no way of knowing the ticket numbers of to keep track of those numbers.
I thought about it and might agree. The reason I say that is because if they had a list of the actual winning ticket numbers in advance, that list could be hacked or a criminal employee could get his or her hands on it and go and tell someone about th list. He did admit that they not only destroy tickets from closing stores but that stores that return open books also get destroyed. let me further explain. When a retailer activates a book to open it and sell it the retailer has 45 days to pay the NYS Lottery for that book. The $30 dollar book cost the retailer $1500 dollars. Yes they get that money back after they sell the book minus their 6% commission for selling it and minus all payouts for winning tickets they paid out. But that still is a big nut for a small retailer to crack. So when the bill is due to be paid 45 days later if the retailer cannot pay for the book they are allowed to return the unsold portion which than gets destroyed.
I than asked the guy about why the NYS lottery does not develop a way to have those tickets sold to the public through their outlet service centers. He said that it has never rally been brought up to even be looked into. That it is something they might be willing to look into in the future. He listened to me for about 15 minutes which was very surprising but satisfying. He answered all my questions and listened to my concerns.
I think that maybe we might be able to get lottery to look into how they can distribute the open books to be destroyed for sale at their service centers. I mean right now at the casino in Queens, their are 5 lotto machines and the top row of all 5 machines, except for 1 slot have the $30 card being sold, that is 19 slots just for this one game. So that game moves so fast that they have to cover 19 slots to accommodate the sales. So why not use that location to sell open books of scratch offs and not destroy them anymore.
Lastly: The new $30 game is not coming out anytime soon. He looked at the list for September and October and it is not listed. He was not sure if it might be included in the Christmas releases in November.
Hoped this helped.
