Lottery machines made everyone a winner

UNITED STATES: The lottery tickets appeared early in the evening on December 25, like a Christmas miracle. For just over two hours, lottery terminals at petrol stations and shops in South Carolina spat out a constant stream of winning tickets, worth US$500 each (NZ$704), until officials noticed the glitch and halted all sales.

By then players of the South Carolina Education Lottery, many of them going from one petrol station to the next, had won the equivalent of US$19.6 million.

None has yet been paid, but the state’s board of commissioners has set US$19.6 million aside while ‘‘legal research and investigation’’ continues and it seeks ‘‘further co-operation’’ from the company that makes the terminals. The rules of the game, laid out online, offer guidance on when winners may claim a prize but say nothing about generous computer errors.

The software glitch struck at 5.51pm, for those who paid an additional U$1 for a ticket called Holiday Cash Add-A-Play. The tickets bore a grid of nine symbols, like that of a noughts and crosses board. If the grid included three Christmas tree symbols in a line, they would win a US$100 prize, up to a maximum of US$500 per ticket.

Nicole Coggins, of the town of Liberty, was delighted to buy a ticket filled with nothing but Christmas trees.

‘‘I was calling everyone I knew,’’ she told the TV station WYFF News 4. She bought another, which also bore nine trees, and drove to two other petrol stations to buy more winning tickets.

Wade Crenshaw, 61, who was working at a petrol station in Liberty, saw a sudden rush of punters desperate to play in the half hour before the game was shut down. ‘‘It was weird, everyone winning so much. I didn’t know if they were doing some kind of Christmas special,’’ he told The New York Times.

Coggins said that she and her motherin-law won about US$18,000, but when she went to claim the money she received a print-out which read: ‘‘Transaction not allowed’’.

The board is determining whether she and others should be paid. Players should hold on to their tickets, it said in a statement.