Concerns surface over Ontario lottery scanners
Last Updated: Tuesday, August 28, 2007 | 7:05 PM ET
CBC News
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Ontario lottery officials are playing down complaints from a Brampton man who says the lottery terminal at his local drug store failed to detect all of the prizes on his winning Lottario ticket.
The Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. has been reeling since the CBC's The Fifth Estate uncovered an insider win scandal where lottery retailers were caught defrauding people of their winning tickets.
There are now questions being raised about the OLG's own equipment and the retailer lottery terminals relied upon to determine who wins and who loses.
Jim Elliott knew something was wrong when he walked into his local Shoppers Drug Mart on July 29 to collect on his winning Lottario ticket.
"I really didn't suspect the girl because she showed me the stub," Elliott told CBC News.
Elliott said he's been playing the same sets of numbers for years and already knew he'd won not just once, but two separate cash prizes.
"I checked my lotto numbers like I do every week on the computer before I go down, and I knew that had won twice on the same ticket," he said.
When the cashier scanned the ticket, only the one row of numbers came up for the $5 prize, he said.
After Elliott complained, Shoppers staff confirmed the scanner had failed. A second scan performed with a supervisor present showed that the ticket in fact had two wins and the store agreed to pay Elliott his additional prize of $28.20.
It was only after reading about the scandal surrounding the OLG and talking with his wife that he realized the glitch could lead to a larger prize being denied.
"I said, 'You know, this could have been a $5-million-winning row of numbers.'"
The manager of the Shoppers Drug Mart location told CBC News that the store called the OLG about the glitch, but no one has ever come to fix the scanners.
Ticket scan failure 'human error': OLG
But the lottery corporation insisted there are no problems with its retailer lottery terminals and it had not heard of the incident until contacted by CBC News.
The company has pulled all the records for the store's lottery terminal for that day and determined the missed cash prize was due to human error by the clerk, not faulty equipment, OLG spokeswoman Teresa Roncon said Tuesday.
"We have been looking at this carefully, and what we've found was that the clerk tried to validate the ticket several times, which the machine will not allow," Roncon said. "Ultimately, though, the customer was paid the full amount."
She said the OLG contacted Elliott and claimed he was "satisfied" with its explanation, but Elliott later refuted that.
He said he and his wife witnessed the lottery validation with their own eyes and the OLG's explanation simply doesn't add up.
He insisted he saw the validation slips to prove that OLG's terminal failed to detect all of the winning lines on his ticket.
"We're not mistaken at all about what we saw," Elliott said. "Now more than ever, I wish I had those validation stubs, because now it's turning to be a 'my word against theirs' — unless that young supervisor would admit it."
"Because when I went to see her the second time and I went through the whole spiel, she totally remembered all that happening."
The OLG is conducting enhanced retailer training, as well as circulating information bulletins to the retailer community to ensure that vendors are well informed about the ticket validation procedures they are required to follow, Roncon said.
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