GTECH Corporation, the operator of the Texas Lottery, has been accused of fraud by nearly 1,000 lottery players. The players, all of whom purchased Texas Lottery Fun 5’s scratch-off tickets, have sued GTECH in state district court in Austin. The instructions printed by GTECH on each Fun 5’s ticket indicated that if the ticket revealed a Money Bag symbol, the player would win five times the amount in the prize box. In their 2nd Amended Petition filed today, the players allege that the ticket language was crafted by GTECH at a time when the parameters of the game provided for 100% of the tickets that revealed a Money Bag symbol to be winners. The players allege that GTECH changed the parameters of the game to make a significant percentage of those tickets losers but did not also change the original ticket language to make it clear that not every ticket with a Money Bag symbol would be a winner. The players allege that GTECH’s decision to use the misleading language was fraudulent and misled them into believing they had purchased winning tickets. The lawsuit seeks nearly $480 million in damages which is the amount that would have been paid to the players had their tickets not been programmed to be losing tickets. Click here to read the players’ 2nd Amended Petition and the list of Plaintiffs in Exhibit A to the petition.
