A man is accused of stealing lottery tickets during a job interview, then trying to cash them

A Horry County man has been charged with three felony counts of intent to defraud the South Carolina Education Lottery. According to the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED), Antonio Levon Ricardo Stewart, 36, was arrested on Tuesday, August 25 after the lottery requested an investigation.

Arrest warrants accuse Stewart of taking lottery tickets during a job interview at a Murphy USA in Florence, and of later attempting to cash them. He was booked into the Florence County Detention Center, and the 12th Circuit Solicitor's Office will prosecute the case.

What the charges carry

The counts are filed under South Carolina Code Section 59-150-260. That section makes it a felony to falsely make, alter, forge, utter, pass or counterfeit a state lottery ticket with intent to defraud. Conviction on a single count carries a fine of up to $50,000, imprisonment of up to five years, or both.

A stolen ticket does not pay, even when it wins

State law already blocks the payout these cases are built on. Section 59-150-220 says a prize must not be paid when the ticket is stolen, counterfeit, altered, fraudulent, unissued, produced or issued in error, unreadable, not received, or not recorded by the commission within the applicable deadlines.

Scratch tickets are not interchangeable pieces of paper. Packs carry serial numbers and are tracked from the printer to the retailer, so a store that reports a theft can give the lottery the numbers of the missing tickets. A ticket flagged that way returns an error at the terminal instead of a prize. Retailers also activate a pack on the lottery machine before selling from it, so tickets that never went through the activation process can be spotted at claim time. Our explainer on what retailers know about scratch tickets covers how the validation system works.

South Carolina brings these cases often

SLED has charged a run of similar cases in the paste few months. A Charleston Circle K worker was charged with lottery ticket fraud, a Bluffton woman was accused of taking tickets from her employer and cashing them for $270, two former store employees were charged in a separate scheme, a clerk was accused of cashing a winning ticket she saw on social media, and another woman was charged with trying to cash stolen scratch-offs.

Most of those defendants worked at the store but the allegation in this case is unusual on that point, since Stewart is accused of taking the tickets as a job applicant rather than as an employee.

The South Carolina Education Lottery sells 39 active scratch-off games that we score, returning an average of 70.6% of sales as prizes. Proceeds fund education programs in the state. The lottery asked SLED to investigate this matter instead of handling it internally.

Sources

WPDE: SLED charges Horry County man with lottery fraud

South Carolina Code of Laws, Title 59 Chapter 150