Sylmar Office Screens Forgeries : For Lottery Cheats, the Buck Stops Here

Photocopies of bungled attempts to cheat the California Lottery are accumulating in a filing cabinet at the lottery’s tiny Sylmar office, and officials there wish the gambling public would give up trying to rig the odds.

“Stop bringing us this garbage!” groaned lottery agent John Coleman.

His partner, Don Allen, produced an example of the “garbage” crossing their desks in Sylmar. It was a copy of a forged “winning” ticket that was presented for a $5,000 prize. It had been made from parts of two tickets, stapled together.

The man who submitted the phony ticket was one of two San Fernando Valley residents who have been arrested on suspicion of trying to illegally collect prizes. The agents are conducting two other criminal investigations and predict there will be more arrests as the lottery stakes rise. The next lottery game will feature $25,000 instant prizes, an increase from the current $10,000.

About 50 forgery attempts have been discovered throughout California.

The methods people use to try to swindle the state vary, but so far they have all been clumsy, the investigators said. “Cut and paste, glue and stick, staples and chewing gum,” Allen said, rattling off the forgeries he has seen.

Players should stop wasting their time and the state investigators’ time by trying to cheat, the investigators said, saying the chances of evading detection are less than the possibility of buying a genuine winning ticket.

Scientific Games Inc., which prints lottery tickets for about two dozen states, maintains a laboratory where technicians try to out-fox dishonest gamblers. The tickets are mutilated, glued, duplicated and patched together in various ways, all to foil forgeries by staying one step ahead of counterfeiters.

Besides, a number at the bottom of each lottery ticket indicates whether the ticket is a winner. If a cheater cuts and pastes tickets together, the number will no longer match the rest of the ticket, which is detected by a computer in Sacramento, the investigators said.

“We think the ticket is pretty impregnable,” Allen said.

The agents said cheaters are under the mistaken impression that, even if their forgery attempt is detected, nothing will happen to them.

People connected to altered lottery tickets have been charged with attempted grand theft and forgery. Those who turn in fake tickets for $1,000 or smaller prizes are charged with misdemeanors and those accused of trying to get away with more than that are charged with felonies, the agents said.

The first Valley resident arrested was Jose Estrada of Sun Valley, who claimed a child tore his $5,000 winning ticket apart and that he merely stapled it together and submitted it to the Sylmar office, the agents said. The 19-year-old security guard said the ticket belonged to his uncle, who gave it to him before returning to Mexico.

Estrada, who said he was surprised by his arrest, vowed that his gambling days are over. “After this, I don’t want to play the lottery anymore,” he said.

Deborah Wisecraver, a 35-year-old waitress from Panorama City, was arrested Friday on suspicion of turning in a bogus $1,000 winning ticket at the Sylmar office. She told authorities the ticket belonged to her husband.