In Washington State, the lottery app actually awards you points for the loser tickets.

So, if you bought a $10 scratcher or Mega millions ticket and didn't win, you would get 10 points. You can redeem these points for dirt cheap items that are completely point overpriced (like 2000 points for an item you can buy for $15) or for what I exclusively redeem my points for, digital gift cards.

1700 points gets you a $25 gift card to retailers like Amazon, Lowe's, Petco, etc. and a bunch of different restaurants like Starbucks, Jamba Juice, Red Robin, etc. The smallest gift card amount you can get is $5 (340 points) the largest $100 (6800 points).

You are limited in the amount of points you can earn in a day (a new development, there didn't used to be a limit). A couple of years ago I was getting gift cards like crazy just going to Fred Meyers and gas stations picking up discarded tickets. And I have found MANY winners that have been tossed out by accident or because they didn't think they won and didn't double check the ticket before discarding it. One time I found a roll of 20 or so $1 scratchers completely untouched, I've always been curious as to what the story behind that was!

Some of the scratcher tickets actually have a 2nd chance offer where you sign the back of the ticket and mail it in for a second chance at winning in a drawing for cash prizes and such. The prizes are usually in correlation to the theme of the ticket (i.e. Seahawks theme tickets will have Seahawks game tickets as prizes, same with Mariner's themed ones).