36 Arrested in Crackdown on Lottery Scams

California Lottery agents today conducted a sting operation that resulted in the arrest of 36 people accused of presenting false and forged tickets for lottery payments.

Most of those arrested were drawn to staged events billed as a special lottery drawing for $100 winners. The forgeries involve ticket facsimiles from the “Three-of-a-Kind” lottery ticket brochures that were attached to losing tickets, then submitted for payment. About 20 of the arrests were made in Southern California.

Lottery agents, working with the Sacramento County district attorney’s office, ended a one-month investigation with today’s operation.

“This was an attempt to defraud the public and the lottery by presenting patently false tickets for $100 prizes,” lottery security chief Lew Ritter said.

“Working with local district attorneys, it was decided to set an example by this operation to dramatize the futility of attempting to rip off the public with phony tickets.”

He said making individual arrests would have diluted the lottery’s efforts to call attention to the bogus ticket scams. The organized crackdown was designed to be a deterrent to such attempts in the future, he added.

Until today, there had been two known breaches in lottery security--both inside jobs.

In October, two night watchmen hired to guard lottery headquarters were caught stealing computer programs.

In February, a former lottery worker was arrested on charges of stealing a winning $5,000 ticket and giving it to her cousin to cash.

Since the Oct. 3 kickoff of the state lottery, Ritter’s security staff of more than 40 agents has investigated a total of nearly 1,500 criminal cases, including about 300 involving forged or questionable lottery tickets.

Lottery investigators, who came to be known around lottery headquarters as “Ritter’s Raiders,” have arrested more than 40 people on charges of turning in forged tickets.