New rules should prevent it from happening again, though.
I’ve always wondered if it was possible. If someone had the balls to do it. It turns out someone did. Someone spent $25 million to buy 26 million lottery tickets so they could have a ticket for almost every possible number combination that could arise—and it worked. They won $95 million, the third-largest Lotto jackpot in state history.
And now the Texas Lottery Commission looks like a bunch of dummies for helping them do it.
In April 2023, a New Jersey-based company called Rook TX orchestrated the insanely large lotto ticket purchase remotely, using stores associated with online lottery sales. According to a Houston Chronicle investigation, the Texas Lottery Commission actively aided them by quickly providing the stores with a massive order of lottery terminals, which they needed to process so many sales. Over twenty times the usual number of Lotto tickets were sold on the day Rook TX won.
None of this is illegal. But people are upset because the commission didn’t investigate the rush order on the terminals. There was no due diligence whatsoever. Someone called asking for an unusually high number of lottery terminals, and the commission said, “Yeah, sure, fine,” and gave it to them, no questions asked. Many questions should have been asked, considering that immediately acquiescing to such a request is a violation of the commission’s regulations, according to the Chronicle. Regulations like reactivating one of lottery retailer’s licenses without looking into whether they had a viable business that was open to the public.
The buyer collected a lump sum of $57.8 million. They essentially doubled their money by making a few phone calls to a regulatory body asleep at the wheel. It wasn’t risk-free, though. There was roughly a one-in-ten chance that someone else would win that day. If that had happened, they would’ve split the pot—and Rook TX would’ve actually lost money on the whole thing.
Now, Texas lawmakers have called for reforms of the lottery commission, and the commission recently reviewed and adjusted its procedures to prevent something like this from happening again. But considering how lax the commission has been with developing and enforcing regulations, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
