Why verify lotto tickets yourself? You may ask. Well, it’s important, and letting others check is extremely dangerous. Do not hand your tickets to the lottery cashier to check if you won. The cashier may return a different one that you did not play.
If you must hand your ticket to someone, ensure you have your signature at the back to prevent anyone from stealing your good fortune. And make sure the lotto clerk knows it. However, these methods are not advisable.1
The best thing to do is to sign your ticket and check the ticket yourself.
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Verify Lottery Tickets to Avoid the Devastating Effect
Take, for example, the experience of one devastated UK player after UK lottery group Camelot refused to pay his multi-million-pound prize for failing to check and keep his ticket.2
The last thing you want to happen to you is to learn that you won but cannot receive the prize because of simple neglect.
Missing Lottery Winners
According to a CNN report, about $800 million worth of lotto prizes are unclaimed yearly. Maybe some of those are yours.3
If you have a ticket and somehow forgot to check it, check with your official lottery website and see it immediately. Each lottery organization has an official website. For instance, aside from checking past lottery results in the Iowa lottery, you can also check the unclaimed prizes on a separate page. The official Florida lottery website has a dedicated page for expiring tickets here.4
If your lottery has no website, you can visit your local lotto station and verify lottery tickets yourself. Again, as I said, do not let the cashier hold your ticket. Ask for the past lottery results and check for yourself.
There are ways to check if you’re a winner. All you have to do is check, and you can do so in many ways.
Use Lottery Apps to Verify Lotto Ticket
Nowadays, it is common for anyone to have and use a smartphone. At the time of writing, there are more than 3 billion smartphone users worldwide, including about 275.56 million in the USA alone.
What does this mean to lottery players? This might make checking your ticket easier for a player like you.
Smartphones allow you to surf the web, so you can visit your state lottery’s website or even watch live drawings to check winning numbers. Alternatively, you can download and install a lottery app on your smartphone to conveniently check numbers.
Many state lotteries now have mobile apps to offer. These apps may vary in capabilities, but the basic feature is scanning numbers to check if the numbers won.
Florida Lottery, for instance, allows you to scan the barcodes on your ticket to see if it is a winner. You may also scan the barcodes on non-winning tickets to enter the Second Chance promotions.
Of course, you could also use an app to scan tickets such as those of Michigan Fantasy 5 In the Massachusetts Lottery. Meanwhile, winners may claim prizes between $601 and $5,000 via the state lottery app.5
You are not limited to these state lottery apps. You have a lot of options to verify lotto tickets. I believe checking your ticket is part of playing the lottery responsibly.
Visit a Retailer to Verify Lotto Tickets
It is best to check the numbers yourself. In some states, there are technological means you can use to check your tickets.
Virginia Lottery, for example, has two interesting alternatives for this.
One is a lottery vending machine in most retailers all over the state. This machine has a touchscreen for accessing and playing all games. More importantly, its built-in ticket checker allows you to scan tickets easily. If you have won a prize of $600, the screen will ask if you want to use this to purchase tickets.
Lottery vending machines are not present in all retail outlets. Players may find a ticket scanner on store countertops, but retail stores have no vending machines.
This ticket scanner plus is a convenient way of checking a ticket. Scan the ticket and see the status in a few seconds.
The gadget will notify you to visit the Virginia Lottery customer service center to claim your prize. You might only need a retailer’s help if you cannot find the ticket scanner.
Unlock Lottery Success with Proven Math-Based and Data-Driven Insights
Access Lotterycodex now!What Happened to the Unclaimed Prize
The number of unclaimed prizes is real because some lottery players neglect to verify lotto tickets. Depending on your local lottery rules, the unclaimed prize may return to the prize pool. However, some lottery authorities divert the prize to charitable works.
In California, for instance, unclaimed jackpot prizes are distributed to public education.
Rules differ in each organization that handles the lottery operation.
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