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A South Korean lottery player who experienced
the delight of buying a winning ticket had his
dreams shattered when officials told him that
he couldn't claim the $1,000,000 prize he thought
he'd won because of a printing error.
Sales of the scratchcard - a Speetto-2000 instant
win ticket - have been stopped by the Prime
Minister's Commission on Lottery after it was
revealed that printers had produced ten tickets
awarding the top prize instead of the expected
four.
Although the tickets could already be in circulation,
lottery officials have said that they are under
no legal obligation to pay out on any of the
six misprinted tickets - something that is bound
to cause plenty of disappointment among anyone
thinking they've struck it lucky.
As with most scratchcards, small print on the
reverse of each card provides a number of rules
concerning validation of winning tickets. In
the case of the Speetto-200 ticket, it is stated
that no payout will be made unless coded numbers
with the issuer, bank and printer all match.
Since the additional six winning tickets were
created by a printing error, the codes don't
match, and the player legally has no right to
receive a payout.
The printing errors are not confined to the
six "accidental" top-prize winning
tickets. Over the past six months, 20 million
tickets have been printed, and some 7,000 have
been affected by printing errors. Although 90
per cent of these invalid tickets have been
recovered, the rest are still in circulation,
and so far just one of the four real jackpot-winning
tickets has been verified and processed as usual.
A spokesperson for the Prime Minister's Commission
on Lottery said: "We suspect that errors
might have occurred when the printers were transmitting
tickets-producing data to the printing system."
27 September 2006
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