Italy froze €25 million from former lottery workers accused of tracking winning scratch tickets to the shops that sold them

Italy's financial police have frozen more than €25 million, about $28 million, belonging to five former employees of the company that ran the country's Gratta e Vinci scratch cards. Investigators say the five used their work logins to find four jackpot tickets on the company's servers, learned which shops the tickets were shipped to, and sent relatives and friends to buy them.

The Guardia di Finanza in Rome carried out the freeze on October 23 for the Lazio office of the Court of Auditors, which pursues losses of public money. It covers 25 properties, including apartments, villas, and garages, in six provinces, plus five cars and motorcycles and some financial holdings. A judge will decide in a closed hearing whether to confirm, change, or lift the freeze. The five have disputed the allegations, and the company itself is not accused of wrongdoing.

The four prizes added up to €24 million. All four shops were far from where most of the suspects lived, many of them in Rome. After the buyers cashed in, they allegedly kept a cut and moved the rest into accounts tied to the employees. The state's argument is that the scheme took the chance out of the game. Without it, some of those prizes might never have been claimed, and the money would have stayed with the government. Back in 2020, Rome prosecutors opened a criminal probe into 12 people, on charges that included aggravated fraud and illegal access to computer systems. The company was Lottomatica, then owned by International Game Technology, and it suspended four employees and said it had worked with investigators from the start. The company's internal code already barred employees from playing. One chat quoted in the 2020 seizure order captured the mood: “And then what? You pop the champagne?”

A clerk can't tell which tickets in a pack are winners, and neither can the store's terminal, as our explainer on pack activation lays out. Texas lottery officials have said games go to stores by the pack, not by the ticket. The Italian case shows where the knowledge does sit. The operator's servers held both which tickets were the big winners and where they were headed, and staff with the right access could connect the two.

American lotteries have had their own insider case, on the draw side. In 2017 an Iowa judge sentenced Eddie Tipton, a former security director of the Multi-State Lottery Association, to 25 years. He admitted rigging the random-number software he had designed so he could pick winning numbers, in a scheme involving seven tickets in five states, and agreed to repay about $2.2 million. Smaller cases turn up at the store level, like a clerk accused of cashing tickets he never paid for.

Public prize data can't flag a ticket like the ones in Italy. Our top prizes remaining tracking shows how many big prizes are left in each game, but no lottery publishes where an unsold winner is sitting. The prizes Italy says should have stayed with the state are the same kind that go unclaimed each year.

Sources

Open: Gratta e Vinci, i dipendenti che hanno fatto comprare i biglietti vincenti ad amici e parenti (Italian)

Casino.org: Lottery employees knew where winning tickets would be sold in alleged $27M scam

Il Fatto Quotidiano: Lottomatica employees cashed million-euro prizes (Italian, 2020)

CNN via ABC15: Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison