THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, July 18, 1994 TAG: 9407180037
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JOSEPH P. COSCO, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 84 lines
Lottery officials call it the case of ``the famous 15-cent piece.''
A man showed up at the Virginia State Lottery's office in Fairfax County to cash in a $1,000 ``winning'' card for Loose Change, an instant game that paid off when the coins on the ticket added up to more than a dollar.
It didn't take an Einstein to spot the hoax. The ticket showed a 50-cent piece, a quarter, a dime and two nickels. On one of the nickels, a ``1'' had been penciled in front of the ``5,'' making the nickel a 15-cent piece.
When the alteration was pointed out to him, the man had a ready excuse: ``Oh, I found that card in the parking lot,'' he claimed, and was allowed to sheepishly disappear.
The man was one of a small but steady stream of people who try to improve their lottery odds by using pen, pencil, scissors and paste to artistically enhance those ubiquitous unlucky cards. Add a number here, change a symbol there, and a losing combination becomes a winner. Maybe.
Since the Virginia State Lottery opened shop in 1988, lottery offices and retail outlets have recovered 242 tickets altered by what one official calls ``pen-and-ink and cut-and-paste artists.''
Surprisingly enough, these amateurish creations sometimes work, usually for small payoffs on instant scratch tickets. But the odds are far from foolproof.
In a recent case, a Hampton Roads woman wasn't as lucky as the man from Fairfax. Janetta Dawn Roberts is accused of three counts of altering tickets and three counts of petit larceny for allegedly trying to redeem three Cash Explosion tickets at Portsmouth retail outlets in October 1993. Each alteration count carries a sentence of one to five years and a fine of up to $2,500.
Roberts was scheduled for trial Wednesday, but she was a no-show.
``Your honor, I'm not sure where my client is,'' public defender Kevin Collins told Circuit Judge Norman Olitsky, who issued a warrant for Roberts' arrest.
Prosecutor Rufus A. Banks Jr. declined to discuss the case in detail but said Roberts tried to cash in on small winnings.
Altered tickets have appeared in steady numbers over the years, according to Dennis Shaw, the lottery's director of security. ``But you're not going to see anyone who does it more than once,'' said Shaw, who as a former Secret Service agent knows a few things about counterfeiters.
Lottery spokeswoman Paula Otto said most of the cases of altered tickets involve the instant cards that offer payoffs ranging from a free ticket to $50,000. People have tried to cash in doctored tickets for up to $5,000, but most of the time the hoped-for payoffs range from $5 to $50.
``The percentage of altered tickets is infinitesimal compared to the number of tickets sold,'' Shaw said. The lottery has had 43 different instant ticket games, with total sales of 1.7 billion instant tickets since the lottery began.
Shaw said that perhaps 50 to 60 cases of altered tickets have been prosecuted, with culprits usually forced to make restitution.
Losses from phony tickets have been small, he said. In most cases, the victims are the retail outlets that purchase the instant tickets outright from the lottery and sell them to customers. Outlets such as 7-Eleven stores can pay off tickets up to $600; bigger prizes must be redeemed through lottery offices.
Shaw said the number of altered tickets is small because most people realize that the odds of pulling the con are slim. He said the instant tickets have squiggly lines through the numbers and symbols that are difficult to reproduce and match up with the rest of the ticket.
The security director said that careful store clerks can validate suspicious-looking tickets by means of coding on the tickets. ``Every ticket is unique,'' he said. ``Every ticket we can check.''
Controls are even tighter for the big-payoff Lotto tickets, such as the ones that are being snatched up for Wednesday's estimated $9.5 million drawing. These tickets are identified by bar code and are checked by being fed back into the terminals from which they are issued.
Still, in a few cases, people have tried to tamper with those tickets. ``It's ludicrous,'' Shaw said. ILLUSTRATION: Since the Virginia State Lottery began in 1988, 242 altered
tickets have been discovered.
KEYWORDS: LOTTO LOTTERY by CNB