Lottery Moments

It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while a printing error on a lottery scratch game card leads hundreds, sometimes thousands of players to believe they’ve won. The mistake was made by a company called G-Tech, the largest producer of scratch game tickets in the world.

So what’s a state to do when this happens?

This is exactly what happened in Virginia a few weeks ago, when more than 600 people thought they had won $7,777 in the state’s new Fast Play Super 7s game.

Wrong.

Virginia Lottery officials said that a human error caused the game to incorrectly spit out 609 winning tickets, leaving hundreds frustrated and wanting their money.

If Virginia is forced to pay out all the Fast Play Super 7s jackpots, it could cost millions.

Virginia Lottery spokesman John Hagerty said that they are consulting with the Virginia Attorney General’s Office to determine what legal responsibility the state lottery has regarding the erroneous tickets.

The $2 instant game is simple: on the ticket you add up a series of computer-generated numbers. The ticket holder wins money for each set of numbers that total seven, with the lowest prize being $2 for one seven, going up to the $7,777 grand prize for eight sevens.

Hagerty said the error was caught just a few hours after Fast Play Super 7s debuted. The game was taken offline, after generating a total of 2,336 tickets, and has not yet been reinstated.

The error, he said, was made by an employee at GTECH, the largest lottery technology business in the world, when the game was being installed into the system.

Bob Vincent, GTECH’s senior vice president for corporate affairs, confirmed it was a programming error, but declined to comment on the status of that worker’s employment.

“We have identified it and corrected it,” he said of the error.

Based in Providence, R.I., GTECH has contracts with 27 state lotteries and has a 70 percent market share worldwide. Each game, Vincent explained, has a software code that determines variations of the game and ensures random winners.

“We’re asking our players to be patient and if they have one of those tickets to hang on to it,” Hagerty said.

Last year, a New Mexico man filed suit against the Sandia Resort and Casino in Albuquerque after he was told his winning pull on a slot machine was a malfunction and he would not be awarded the nearly $1.6 million prize.

Also last year, a Pennsylvania man said he was denied the $102,000 that he won off a slot machine at the Philadelphia Park Casino after security officials told him the jackpot was caused by a flawed test the casino was running.