Computer Bug Causes Lotto Aggravation for Winners

Hundreds of thousands of Lotto and Decco winners went home with empty pockets Thursday as a computer glitch forced a daylong delay in payoffs for the first time in the California Lottery’s four-year history.

By day’s end, lottery computer sleuths had located the problem and announced that they would work through the night to correct it so payoffs could resume sometime today.

Lottery officials said on an average day, about 550,000 people win cash prizes and replay tickets in Lotto, where players bet on winning numbers, and Decco, where they bet on spots on playing cards. The breakdown did not affect the game in which players seek to scratch off winning combinations of numbers and symbols.

Joanne McNabb, communications manager for the California State Lottery, said the malfunction was an equipment failure that destroyed a small amount of the data on the computer file used to validate winning tickets. She said officials discovered the problem when they tried to reconcile ticket sales in the validation file with the file in another computer.

“There could be only five or 10 ticket (sales) that are missing but we had to suspend ticket cashing and validation,” she said. “That meant people who had a winning Lotto or Decco (ticket) were not able to get them paid or validated either at the retailer or at the lottery office.”

She said the lost data will now be reconstructed overnight from a master file that keeps duplicate information as a backup.

The payoff delay will mostly affect the smaller winners. Big winners have to turn in their tickets at the district lottery office and usually must wait 10 days to two weeks to receive a check from the state controller.

Under California law, before the controller can issue a check for more than $600 he must make sure the winner has no outstanding state debts, such as back taxes or overdue child-support payments. Any debts owed are deducted from the winnings.

The only other time in the lottery’s history that computer problems have affected winners occurred last week, when some Decco winners in Southern California were unable for a few hours to cash their tickets. That time officials said the computer file was overloaded with winners and had to be quickly expanded.

McNabb said winners should not expect to be able to cash their tickets right at 6 a.m. as usual, but may have to wait until later in the day.

For most retailers in the Los Angeles area who market the lottery tickets, the one-day suspension in ticket cashing meant extra work for sales personnel but generally didn’t seem to produce many complaints from customers.

An exception was a 7-Eleven store in Westwood where customers like to use their winnings to buy more tickets.

“They figured we were just giving them a hassle,” manager Joel Weiner said. “They use their winnings to play and they didn’t want to spend more money. They figured it (the suspension of the payoffs) was just a ploy to get more money.”

Particularly upset was a $5,000 Decco winner who called the store nervously throughout the day only to be disappointed when she found out it still couldn’t validate her winning ticket.

At the Beverly Hills Liquor Castle, where more than 100 winners usually cash tickets daily, Florence Levi employed a little practical wisdom to forestall any complaints from her customers.

“They understood when I said ‘Look, things break down sometimes, even human beings break down,’ ” she recalled. “I told them, ‘Your money’s in the bank. Don’t worry, whenever it’s working, we’ll pay.’ ”

On most days about 150 winners visit Richard Wildason’s Alameda Junior Market and Deli in Burbank to collect their winnings, so on Thursday it was only a matter of minutes after the store opened its doors at 7 a.m. that he discovered the machines weren’t accepting any tickets.

“I just told them the lines are down; there is a malfunction and they understood,” Wildason said.