Complaint Review: Virginia Lottery

I guess that I will finally have to take my rose colored glasses off when it comes to contests and sweepstakes. I most recently received a letter from the VA Lottery Commission stating that I had winning tickets (3 tickets listed) in their 25th Anniversary Bash Contest. I looked for the tickets with the numbers recorded in their letter - but was frustrated when I found out that the numbers that were in the letter do not exist in their system. As a matter of fact, those numbers are invalid and do not belong to any number that the VA lottery has ever issued. Of course (according to them) it is my fault, and the lottery takes no responsibility for accepting numbers that they in fact have never issued in any of their games - but my confusion comes in this question: how can an application accept numbers that do not exist and then randomly (smile) choose those numbers as winners. Is this not an oxymoron because the numbers in question are actually losers. The letter that I received from the Virginia lottery read: Congratulations! Your tickets in the Virginia Lottery 25th Birthday Fest Sweepstakes have been drawn as a winner of a $250 Visa Reward Card. The winning ticket numbers are listed below: Safecracker: 1408-069423-4-080 Safecracker: 1408-069423-081 and Blackjack 1453-010976-7-042. I called the Va Lottery and explained to them that the ticket numbers listed in the letters did not match any of the tickets in my possession. I asked where those tickets were brought, and the person speaking replied that they could not find that out because they were losing ticket numbers. To me this made no sense because I was sure that the Virginia Lottery must have a way to track every one of their tickets, so I called one of their offices (from their website) and asked the person who answered if they could track the number of the tickets for me. It was then when I was told that the numbers I was asking about were Invalid Numbers and that those numbers do not correspond with any ticket batch in their system.

So as a result, I was unable to claim my prize - I did contact the Va Lottery, I actually sent a letter to the person I spoke to, along with a Va Lottery IT person, a marketing person and the Lottery Director - part of my letter included my earlier sentiments as follows: I said, So this is where my confusion comes in. I do not understand how a system allows input of numbers that do not exist. How can you let a number that could never possibly win be declared a winner? I am not an IT person but when your write a program do you not include null and void properties. If a series of tickets have a beginning 4 digit identity to define its game - why let unrelated identifiers in? Something is inherently wrong with your system. I received a reply which read; Thank you for contacting us. We always appreciate feedback from our valuable players. I am certainly sorry to hear about your frustration with this promotion. This particular promotion required players to select specific games from a dropdown menu. You are correct that there was not an initial way, from the back end, to verify whether or not what the player entered was correct (i.e. an eligible game). We did our best to communicate to players that they needed to double-check that their entries were correct. It was on the “thanks for entering” screen and then, of course, players could also review tickets entered in their account, as well as edit or remove an incorrect entries. Just as you suggested, we are indeed working on a feature (though it will take some time to implement) that will help with verification at the exact point of entry.

All of that said, I understand your frustration and would like to offer you some Scratcher tickets as a token of our appreciation for being one of our valuable players. If you are willing, please provide me a complete mailing address and I will put some games in the mail to you right away. They sent me 3 losing tickets, and did not mention that the system did give you an error code when a wrong number was submitted that asked the user to verify the information submitted. This is not the first time this has happened to me, there was an even bigger contest that I entered with HGTV - this particular contest revolved around a question and if the caller answered it correctly they could win $100,000.00 - I was shocked when my call went through, but disappointed again when they hung up on me. When I contacted their corporate office and told them what happened their lawyer wrote me and said they only made one call, and that was to the person that actually won the game, I then emailed them a copy of my sprint bill showing the number on my bill revealed a 1 minute call to the number they gave on TV as the dial in (if a call does not go through you cannot be charged for it) they ignored that letter and never talked to me again. But that's not all I also entered a contest once at the Hilton Hotel in Tyson Corner where the winner's name was drawn from a shoe box, I actually saw the person who was drawing the name fish for an entry that was taped to the bottom of the box. That entry was declared the winner. Are all contests without integrity? Just saying!