Oregon Lottery Kept Quiet Glitch That Read Winning Tickets As LosersLottery Says It Can't ID Victims Of July 23 Software Malfunction |
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A scandal has hit the Oregon Lottery after it failed to alert players that a temporary technical glitch was causing winning keno tickets to read as losing tickets.
OregonLive.com reported that the Oregon Lottery’s keno game glitched for about six hours on July 23, and it didn’t shut down the game while technicians were fixing the issue. The Lottery reportedly never publicized the glitch, which impacted nearly 200 winning tickets.
OregonLive reportedly had to submit a public records request before the Lottery provided information on the incident. The Lottery claims that the 172 tickets that scanners misread resulted in only about $1,400 in unclaimed keno winnings.
The Lottery is unable to obtain names of the affected customers, the report said. Players who still have their tickets from July 23 can rescan them and have up to a year to claim their winnings.
The glitch reportedly wouldn’t have been made public had it not been for keno player and small business owner Scott Graf. The day before, Graf bought a keno ticket that he thought was an $1,100 winner. However, he went to a local grocery store during the early morning hours of July 23 to scan his ticket and the machine erroneously said it was a loser.
“If I had not checked the tickets in my pocket the night before but only in the morning as I normally do I would have thrown away $1,152 and neither you nor I would have never known,” he wrote in a July 30 email to the Oregon Lottery. “I do not believe, nor do I think you can prove this is a one-time occurrence or that you can be confident that this will not happen again.”
The Oregon Lottery, powered by Las Vegas-based IGT, rakes in about $1.2 billion each year. Keno was played 73.7 million times in 2017, generating about $100 million in revenue.
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