California Lottery Data Shows Some Ticket Sellers Winning Dozens, Hundreds Of Times
SAN JOSE (KPIX 5) -- How many times have you played the lottery and lost? You'd have better luck at the blackjack table.
But some people in California are winning hundreds of times, sometimes multiple times a day. Is it just luck? Many frequent winners have something in common.
It's one of the winningest lottery stores in the Bay Area: Dolce Espresso in San Jose has reported 212 winning tickets worth $600 or more in the past decade. The luckiest winner is owner Minh Nguyen. He's claimed 87 of them.
At the Jelly Donut in Daly City, owner Frank Huynh claimed 15 winning Scratchers worth a thousand bucks each, in just the past two years.
And Angela Kouch and her frequent customer Jose Ruiz combined: A whopping 380 wins at her store, MJB Video in L.A.
Notice a theme? Data obtained from the California Lottery shows many of the most frequent winners in California are retailers.
"I definitely would say that some of them defy the odds," said Skip Garibaldi. He's a mathematics professor at UCLA, and an expert on the lottery.
He crunched the numbers for us, and estimates that if these store owners are really buying their own tickets, they're spending a fortune.
Like Frank Huynh at the Jelly Donut: "Over his 642-day span of collecting prizes I think he was spending about $1,300 a day," said Garibaldi. That's $840,000 total to win $32,000.
Numbers like that he says are improbable: "You can get lucky once, you can buy a mega millions ticket and you can win. But if you win twice you either spent a lot of money or something is up," said Garibaldi.
The lottery's chief enforcement officer, Steve Tacchini said something called discounting may be at play.
That's when customers sell their winning tickets to the retailer for less than they are worth. "People have liens or judgments, could be child support payments. They know if the tickets go into a claim, part of that will be garnished. Unfortunately there are some unscrupulous retailers out there that take advantage of these situations," said Tacchini.
Like at MJB video. After half an hour of denials and excuses owner Angela Kouch finally fessed up: I just help the people, but I don't make any one penny on customer," she said.
Tacchini said claiming a ticket that is not really yours is a violation of lottery regulations, it's not a crime.
But another way some retailers could be claiming so many wins is criminal: They could be cheating unsuspecting customers. In stings conducted randomly across the state, lottery investigators posing as customers use a decoy winning ticket to test the retailers' honesty.
Tacchini says the bad apples are a minority. "We have 22,000 retailers and the routine testing we do has them at 98 to 99 percent compliance," he said.
He said the lottery has tightened regulations to stop retailer cheating. Now all winners of $600 or more have to disclose if they are owners or employees of stores. The new rules went into effect in 2007, the very year Minh Nguyen's winning streak abruptly ended at Dolce Espresso.
He didn't want to talk about it, and even denied he plays the lottery at all, even though his name and the name of his store are clearly on the lottery's database.
Same story at the Jelly Donut. Owner Frank Huynh at first denied he plays Scratchers then told us it was his wife. He also denied ever buying discounted tickets from his customers.
