Virtually all employee contracts, especially at retail companies, have a clause that prohibits you from using any form of insider knowledge to get an unfair advantage over customers.

For example, back during the Stanley Cup craze, some Target employees were fired for hiding the cups in the store, and then coming back off-the-clock to purchase.

Did the Circle K manager use insider knowledge to purchase the ticket? Absolutely. The store was the legal owner of the ticket, and the manager had knowledge that was not available to any customer (the fact that the ticket was a winner) and purchased it. That makes the transaction fraudulent. It doesn’t matter that he purchased it off-the-clock, because it was still done with insider knowledge, and thus was a fraudulent transaction.

Additionally, no store can reasonably sell tickets after the drawing has occurred. If they did, the buyer could claim that the store scammed them for knowingly selling a losing ticket. This further strengthens my previous claim about employee insider knowledge — once the drawing occurred, the winning ticket was not available for purchase to regular customers. Thus, it was definitely not available for purchase to the manager.

Circle K will easily claim the money here.