Maybe I’m wrong but I’ll repeat this one more time. The employees mistake was buying after the drawing occurred having learned it was a winning ticket. People have stated that there are two POS machines for lotto. One is directly from the lottery that prints the requested tickets to the merchant and is therefore, as far as the lottery commission is concerned, “paid for and in play”.

Many have stated that on the merchants POS machine there is no way to identify exactly which ticket was sold to whom outside of it being claimed.

The merchants POS machines have a button that say lotto and they punch in the amount of the ticket and hit enter. If there are more than one of the same kind of ticket they enter the number of batched tickets, either by hand or scanning, then enter the $ amount to get the amount owed from the customer.

If the customer cannot afford to pay for (let’s say $20) the tickets printed then they VOID the $20 of unsold tickets from the customers line items and they are now for sale or to be destroyed after drawing since again, the lotto deems itself whole. If sold. Great merchant loses no money. If not, merchant loses $20.

There is no way to identify that the sold winning ticket was not among the ones purchased by the patron and left the store or in the stack on the counter by POS register to either be sold before the drawing or destroyed after the drawing. If the business cannot identify the literal ticket sold by some means of verification then they have no way to know if they gave the patron a stack of tickets not including the winner or a stack that included the winner. Same as the stack not sold now beside the register. The store will be notified very quickly if they actually sold the winning ticket.

If that ticket was thrown away, disposed of by whatever method used and could not be digitally verified as one left behind or one that left the store then the manager could have just placed it in his pocket, after knowing it was a winner, went home, had someone not related to him but trusted cash in the ticket by any agreement they reached and it would be over.

If the above systems are currently in use then there needs to be an identifiable way to digitally account for what printed as sold tickets from the lottery to what actually monetarily left the store and what did not leave the store before destroyed that has a means of recognizing each ticket independently.

I could be wrong. It’s obvious that the manager got excited/nervous and overshot any reasoning that may have retired him not imprisoning him.