Win or lose ?

by 8DonCo Sun Feb 18, 2024 10:25 pm

Man sues Powerball lottery after being told his apparent $340m win was error

A man who thought he had won a $340m Powerball jackpot is suing the lottery after the game’s administrators said their website only showed his numbers as the winning combination by mistake.

Washington DC resident John Cheeks purchased a Powerball lottery ticket at the center of the dispute on 6 January 2023. Although Cheeks did not see the Powerball drawing the following day, he saw his numbers posted on the DC lottery’s website two days later.

The digits on his ticket were a combination of family birthdays and other numbers of personal significance. Speaking to NBC Washington, Cheeks said, “I got a little excited, but I didn’t shout, I didn’t scream. I just politely called a friend. I took a picture as he recommended, and that was it. I went to sleep.”

But then things for Cheeks took a turn for the worse when he went to the office of lottery and gaming (OLG) to redeem his ticket. Court documents allege that administrators denied Cheeks’ jackpot claim, saying in a letter to him: “Petitioner’s prize claim was denied … because the ticket did not validate as a winner by the OLG’s gaming system as required by OLG regulations.”

In a court declaration, Taoti project manager Brittany Bailey said that on 6 January 2023, the company’s quality assurance team was conducting testing of a task involving a changing of time zones for the Powerball website from Coordinated Universal Time to Eastern Standard Time.

At 12.09pm that day, the Taoti quality assurance team accidentally posted test Powerball numbers on the game’s live website rather than a development environment which mimicked the site but was not viewable to the public, according to Bailey.

Bailey added that the test numbers were not the numbers drawn for the 7 January 2023 Powerball drawing. They also could not have been the numbers drawn because the incorrect ones were posted on 6 January, a day prior to the drawing.
On 8 January, the incorrect lottery numbers were listed next to the actual winning numbers on the DC Lottery website. Upon realizing the error on 9 January, the Taoti development team took down the numbers, Bailey said.