State refuses to pay lottery ‘winners’ due to glitch

Thousands of lottery players in South Carolina thought Christmas was their lucky day.

Starting at 5:51 p.m. Dec. 25, gas stations and convenience stores across the state dispensed a steady stream of what appeared to be winning tickets.

Some customers caught on to the anomaly and bought as many as they could. Nicole Coggins, 36, of Liberty, S.C., was one of them.

“We figured we’d buy a reliable vehicle and take the kids to Disneyland,” she said, adding that she and a few other family members kept playing the game until they amassed what they thought were thousands of dollars in winnings.

But Coggins was not able to cash in. The state suspended the game after two hours, at 7:53 p.m., and in a statement two days later, the South Carolina Education Lottery said its computer system vendor, Intralot, had experienced a programming error.

The would-be winners held on to their tickets for months. But on Wednesday, the lottery said in a statement that the error had indeed stemmed from the vendor’s coding error and that ticket holders could send in their slips — not to receive any winnings, but rather for a reimbursement of the ticket price.

It added that according to state law, “prizes arising from a ticket produced or issued in error must not be paid.”

“Regrettably, these errors by the former vendor led loyal players to mistakenly believe that they held winning tickets,” the statement said. “While SCEL is mindful of the magnitude of this decision on its players, any other decision would not comply with the law.”

Coggins was not pleased. “It’s not fair,” she said. “It’s not right.” She noted that some people who bought winning tickets were able to cash them in immediately and keep the money.

Tim Madden, a lawyer representing the state lottery, said that the erroneous winnings would have totaled around $35 million, and that ticket holders who cashed in immediately were able to collect about $1.7 million because of the error.

“Those players who got the winnings got an extraordinary windfall to which they were not entitled,” he said. “They just happened to be at the right place at the right time.”

The game was a seasonal offering called Holiday Cash Add-a-Play.