2024-02-21 09:37:12
A man from the USA is suing the lottery company after it refused to give him the prize money worth 340 million dollars. The reason? Human error resulted in the winning numbers appearing on the website not being the correct numbers
illustration | Photo: Shutterstock
John Cheeks from Washington DC. si. He was sure that this time he succeeded. He bought a Powerball lottery ticket and filled it with numbers that were a combination of family birthdays and other numbers of personal significance. Two days later he entered the lottery website and discovered that he had won $340 million.
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In an interview with NBC, he said: “I was a little excited, but I didn’t shout, I didn’t scream. I just politely called a friend. I photographed the results as he recommended, and that’s it. I went to sleep”.
However, when he tried to redeem his ticket and receive the prize money, Powerball executives refused to award him the prize and claimed that “the petitioner’s prize claim was rejected because the ticket was not valid as a winner on the lottery system as required by the regulations.” Moreover, Cheeks claims that one of the employees even tried to persuade him to get rid of the card and told him to throw the card in the trash can: “This card is no good, throw it in the trash can. You’re not going to get paid.’
Cheeks of course did not throw the ticket in the trash, but kept it in a safe and contacted a lawyer to sue Powerball, the National Lottery Association and the franchise Taoti Enterprises. The franchisee herself testified that the company’s quality control team conducted a test with dummy numbers, and mistakenly published them on the company’s official website instead of the development environment that deleted the website but was not available for viewing by the public.
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She further explained that the wrong numbers were published a day before the correct numbers were announced, and only a day after the announcement the development team discovered the error and hurried to take the numbers down.
Cheeks’ lawyer, Richard Evans, was not impressed by the explanation. “Even if a mistake was made, the question is what do you do about it?”
The court has not yet ruled on Cheeks’ case, but his lawyer hopes that they will admit their mistake and pay the winnings that are due to his client.
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