Indeed, once a game's top prizes are all claimed, future ticket sales would appear to earn more for the Illinois Lottery and its private contractor, Camelot Illinois LLC, because they no longer have to pay out any large jackpots on that game. “So I’m not surprised that this drive for revenue, no matter where they can find it and how they can find it, has led the Illinois Lottery to cut corners or sort’ve treat its players unfairly.” “Scratch tickets are the bread and butter of state lottery commissions,” Cohen said. “It strikes me as certainly dishonest on the part of the Illinois State Lottery,” said historian Jonathan Cohen, who recently published a book on state lotteries. He points out that – because the Lottery is a state agency – it is immune from federal truth-in-advertising laws that could prohibit the sales of tickets that advertise a non-existent jackpot. Yet the Lottery’s “end date” for this game is not until April 18 – 77 days after that last top prize was claimed. The ticket’s biggest prize now is $1,000 – one twenty-fifth of the prize advertised on the front. Or take the “Triple Dynamite 777” game that costs only $2 a ticket to “win up to $25,000,” according to the front of the ticket. But that’s not true either, because the last $25,000 prize was claimed on Jan. That’s 67 days of sales, where the promise of possibly winning a seven-figure jackpot simply is not true.

Yet, according to the Lottery’s schedule, retailers may continue to sell this ticket until April 25. The most you can win, now, is $50,000 – one one-twentieth of the advertised big prize. But NBC 5 Investigates and Telemundo Investiga discovered the last million-dollar prize was claimed back on Feb. Take the game “$1 Million Mega Money,” which costs $10 for a single ticket.įor months, the Lottery advertised that you can “win up to $1,000,000” in this game.

On average, the Lottery allowed each of these games to stay on the market for 73 days - more than two months - while still advertising that you could win a top prize, when you absolutely could not. We examined a total of 169 different instant games and found that the Lottery continued to sell millions of tickets for 83 of those games – nearly half – even after all their top prizes were gone: not for a few days after the big prizes were gone not even for a few weeks, but for months. Boy, 16, wounded in Northwest Side shooting

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