After an investigation into the NYS Lottery division's practices of how the conduct their sales of Scratch offs I have no choice but to conclude that NYS Lottery conducted an all out attempt to prevent the final top prize of Game 596 1 million dollars a year for life scratch off from being claimed. I lay out the conclusions and facts as I have found them.
I have called and/or visited over 2000 retailers throughout NYS with dates and times and retailers names and was told that as far back as July of 2015 the NYS lottery and Gtech representatives were visiting their retail establishments asking for their open and closed books of game 596 be handed in to them for credit, to be destroyed and that the game was over. When in fact it was not until August 11, 2015 when the game was actually called for retirement with 1 winner left. That meant that NYS Lottery and Gtech had NO MORE books to distribute and with 1 final remaining top prize left, the retailers could sell what they had left, open and closed books and any winning tickets could be claimed until August 11, 2016, which meant that in reality they could have sold their tickets until at least 1 month before Aug 11, 2016.
Starting around October of 2015 NYS lottery and Gtech aggressively started to send representatives around NYS to collect all books open and closed for destruction with the language stated to retailers that they HAD to return all books because they could no longer sell those tickets. This was a blatant lie right from the get go.
As of about 2 weeks ago there is not 1 retailer left with tickets to sell that I could find only supporting my theory that they tried to prevent the ticket from being claimed Not only that a representative from the legal department admitted that NYS Lottery does not have a standard policy of how to remove tickets when the game is ending and that the usual procedure is to START recalling tickets about 6 months before the final date for claiming. NOT 1 year or 8 months but 6 months only adding speculation that there is some kind of fraud being conducted here. Until August of 2016 we will not have the final figures of tickets that were destroyed for this year but I am sure that it will be a very high number maybe even besting the entire run of destroyed tickets with this one year alone.
I have filed letters of intent to sue and for a request of an investigation to all the members of the NYS Senate and Assembly gaming committee members who over see this operation as well as the Southern district federal District Attorney and every district attorney for every county that sells NYS lottery.
At this point whether this goes anywhere at the very least it has called into question the illegal practises of the nYS Lottery and GTech and I have lost faith in how NYS conducts their policies and systems. After this I have vowed to never again support the NYS lottery system and will buy my tickets for 1 years worth of games through another states mailing system and will never again support the NYS Lottery.
This is a violation of our trust and a blatant manipulation to prevent the final winning ticket fo ever being sold. This ticket is in such high demand that the state of NY could have made a lot more money by just letting it sell out because every retailer has said they get at least 3 people looking for the tickets a day. If any comes across a retailer that has any left would you please in box me I would like to speak to that retailer. This was for everyone;s information to know how our lottery is conducting their business and how they manipulated this game. I thought everyone should know what is going on.
