South Carolina lottery: $500 winning tickets arise from error
CHARLESTON, South Carolina (WCBD) — Imagine you buy a lottery ticket and find out you have won $500. That’s what happened to lots of people on Christmas Day.
Now, South Carolina lottery officials say it was all a mistake.
SC education lottery officials said a programming error at the lottery’s computer vendor, Intralot, caused Holiday Add-A-Play tickets that were sold between 5:51 p.m. and 7:53 p.m. Dec. 25 to have a play symbol to be repeated in all nine play areas. That means the ticket would win the top prize of $500. When the error was discovered, sales for that game were stopped. All other lottery tickets and games continued as usual.
Bharat Patel is the Owner of Big T’s gas station in Goose Creek. They are the largest lottery sales location in South Carolina. He said some customers who paid $5 won up to $2,500 on the game.
“They got like $5 and play with like $2,500 worth of tickets,” Patel said.
He said customers are understandably very upset. People are “mad. So mad. I said, ‘We can’t do anything.’ We can’t,” Patel said.
Lottery officials said they will make another announcement later this week once a review is completed.