“She claimed to have bought the ticket and claimed to have had sole and exclusive possession of the ticket and that turned out not to be true,” Kim said in the deposition. In the deposition, Kim said he doesn’t know who is the real owner of the winning game he has no evidence proving Patel submitted the ticket for someone else and that lottery officials have never attempted to determine if Patel or her family members owe money to the state. “These facts can lead to no conclusion other than that you are cashing the ticket for someone else,” Kim wrote in the denial letter. The letter also says the Patels both stated that Ramilaben Patel was the only person who ever had possession of the game, but an in-store video at a Kroger in DeKalb County showed one of her sons scanning the game to make sure it was a winner. Everyone knew they were cashing tickets for other people. “There were 60 or 70 people that had claimed over 50. “We had some people that had claimed - I think there were a dozen that had claimed over a hundred prizes,” Kim said in the deposition.

Kim said the system of investigating winning games became necessary when lottery officials noticed some individuals were claiming prizes at statistically impossible rates. There is no warning on the games that prizes can be withheld, although the fine print does say that winners are “subject to Lottery rules and applicable state law.” Since 2014, scratch-off games have paid out $1 million or more 192 times. The odds of winning $100 is 1 in 38 the odds of winning $5,000 is 1 in 60,000 - and the odds of winning the $10 million grand prize is 1 in 4.2 million, according to the Lottery’s website.

But the odds of winning big payouts are minuscule.įor example, the $30 Super Max The Money game has overall odds of winning at 1 in 2.78. The odds of winning a prize with any particular game vary slightly, but all are roughly 1 in 3.

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