Lottery’s unclaimed prizes pile higher

The Arkansas Scholarship Lottery’s unclaimed prizes have steadily increased each year since the lottery started selling tickets on Sept. 28, 2009.

The lottery’s unclaimed prizes totaled $4.84 million in fiscal 2011, the lottery’s first full fiscal year, increasing to $4.89 million in 2012, to $5.19 million in 2013 and to $5.4 million in fiscal 2014.

Unclaimed prizes increased the past two years, even though lottery revenue dropped.

Ticket sales, which peaked in fiscal 2012 at $473 million, slipped to $440 million in 2013 and dropped to $410.6 million in 2014.

Asked why the lottery’s unclaimed prizes have increased each year, even as ticket sales declined, lottery spokesman Patrick Ralston said “it’s hard to provide a definitive answer to this one.”

There are more lottery games available and being played, he said.

“You could also partially attribute it to the larger Powerball and Mega Millions jackpots,” Ralston said.

“Higher jackpots equal more plays and attract more players. More players and more plays increase the likelihood that a player may not realize they won a smaller prize, or did win a prize but failed to cash the ticket in the time allowed,” he said.

Most often, it’s instant-win tickets that aren’t redeemed. Scratch-off tickets are the lion’s share of the lottery’s ticket sales.

Unclaimed prizes for scratch-off tickets totaled $3.4 million in fiscal 2011, $3 million in 2012, $3.5 million in 2013 and $3.52 million in 2014, according to lottery records.

The deadline to claim a

prize for a scratch-off ticket game is 90 days after the ticket sales end.

Once a scratch-off game’s deadline passes, lottery officials calculate how much money went unclaimed overall, but they can’t tell how many winning tickets were never returned.

“There is no way to determine how many unclaimed prizes there are,” Ralston said.

For a draw game, a player has 180 days from the game’s draw date to claim a prize, according to Ralston.

Unclaimed prizes for draw games like Powerball, Mega Millions, Cash 3 and Cash 4, and the Natural State Jackpot totaled $1.4 million in fiscal 2011, $1.86 million in 2012, $1.69 million in 2013 and $1.87 million in 2014, according to lottery records.

The largest unclaimed prize for Arkansas’ lottery so far wasn’t even sold in Arkansas. The owner of a $77 million Powerball ticket, sold in Georgia in June 2011, never stepped forward, so he forfeited the money. Arkansas’ share of the Powerball windfall was $344,042.

States that are members of Powerball “receive their pro rata share of the sales back that funded the prize [and] that amount represents our pro rata sales for that draw,” Ralston said.

The second-largest unclaimed prize was $250,000 from a July 12, 2013, Mega Millions drawing; the prize expired on Jan. 8, 2014, he said.

Almost all of the unclaimed prize money goes to Arkansas Academic Challenge Scholarship recipients.

In fiscal 2012, the lottery’s net proceeds peaked at $97.5 million, dropping to $90.2 million in 2013 and $81.4 million in 2014.

The lottery’s net proceeds are projected to be $78.2 million in fiscal 2015.

The Arkansas Scholarship Lottery has helped fund more than 30,000 college scholarships a year during each of the past four fiscal years.