Illinois Lottery Keeps Selling Many Instant Games For Months After All Top Prizes Are Gone

The Illinois Lottery’s "Emerald 7s” game features a festive kelly-green ticket with a tempting promise on the front: "Win up to $400,000!"  

But that’s not true: The most you can win is one one-eightieth of that -- $5,000 – which certainly would be nice, but would you knowingly shell out $5 for a ticket to a game where you have absolutely no chance of winning the top featured prize?

In February, NBC 5 Investigates first revealed a troubling pattern: We tracked a total of 13 of the Illinois Lottery’s "Instant Games” which we found for sale every day for a month, even though the advertised top prizes were all long gone. This, despite the fact that the Lottery’s written policy says it is supposed to discontinue a game as soon as the last top prize is claimed. 

But more than a month after our original story, we re-checked the Lottery's website and still found 11 instant games, all promising you can "win up to" a certain amount. But you can’t. For every one of these games, your chances of winning the big prize is zero.

So is this a “bug” of the Illinois Lottery’s scratch-off games? Or a feature?

After our first story, NBC 5 Investigates and Telemundo Investiga filed a public records request with the state to get data for all the instant games that the Lottery has sold, from 2020 to the present.

We examined a total of 169 different instant games and found that the Lottery continued to sell millions of tickets for 83 of those games – nearly half – even after all their top prizes were gone: not for a few days after the big prizes were gone; not even for a few weeks, but for months. On average, the Lottery allowed each of these games to stay on the market for 73 days -- more than two months -- while still advertising that you could win a top prize, when you absolutely could not.

Take the game “$1 Million Mega Money,” which costs $10 for a single ticket. 

For months, the Lottery advertised that you can “win up to $1,000,000” in this game. But NBC 5 Investigates and Telemundo Investiga discovered the last million-dollar prize was claimed back on Feb. 17. The most you can win, now, is $50,000 – one one-twentieth of the advertised big prize. Yet, according to the Lottery’s schedule, retailers may continue to sell this ticket until April 25. That’s 67 days of sales, where the promise of possibly winning a seven-figure jackpot simply is not true.

Or take the “Triple Dynamite 777” game that costs only $2 a ticket to “win up to $25,000,” according to the front of the ticket. But that’s not true either, because the last $25,000 prize was claimed on Jan. 31. Yet the Lottery’s “end date” for this game is not until April 18 – 77 days after that last top prize was claimed. The ticket’s biggest prize now is $1,000 – one twenty-fifth of the prize advertised on the front.

“It strikes me as certainly dishonest on the part of the Illinois State Lottery,” said historian Jonathan Cohen, who recently published a book on state lotteries. He points out that – because the Lottery is a state agency – it is immune from federal truth-in-advertising laws that could prohibit the sales of tickets that advertise a non-existent jackpot.

“Scratch tickets are the bread and butter of state lottery commissions,” Cohen said. “So I’m not surprised that this drive for revenue, no matter where they can find it and how they can find it, has led the Illinois Lottery to cut corners or sort’ve treat its players unfairly.”

Indeed, once a game's top prizes are all claimed, future ticket sales would appear to earn more for the Illinois Lottery and its private contractor, Camelot Illinois LLC, because they no longer have to pay out any large jackpots on that game. That can mean significant money, because the sale of instant games account for nearly as much income as all of the Lottery's other big jackpot games, combined.

We found that retailers don’t like the practice of selling these types of tickets, either:

“[Lottery officials] don’t tell us that the prizes are gone,” one Little Village retailer said. “So that’s why … we keep selling, thinking that they’re still there, because we have no way of – we don’t know – we have no way of knowing.”

“Everybody is struggling to have a peso in the bag," the retailer continues, "and it makes me sad to see people buying a ticket and not earning anything. It’s like throwing it away.”

“You’re deliberately – kind of like tricking people into buying these, and … the highest one has been claimed,” said Michelle Dibiase, who occasionally plays instant games. “I think they should take them out of circulation once it is.” 

So why can’t the Lottery do exactly that?

We posed that question to the Lottery’s spokesperson. She said lottery representatives let their retailers know when a ticket no longer has a top prize, but added: “As the process involves physically removing hundreds of thousands to millions of tickets from our stores for a particular game, that process can take up to 1 to 3 months to complete. … We will continue to look for ways to make this process even better for our players and retailers.”

She also points out that it is possible to find out which Instant Games no longer offer their top prizes, at this page on the Illinois Lottery’s website. It’s updated constantly and clearly shows those tickets where all top prizes have been claimed.

But Cohen points out that you have to know to check there – and have the resources to do so -- before you spend money on a game. “It’s only by going on their website and scrolling down and opening up [a specific page] and seeing under this table that the prizes have been won – that, to me, seems just an extra level of unfairness,” he says.

Here are some examples of Instant Games that we found the Illinois Lottery promoting this week, even though the top-tier prizes were all claimed, usually weeks or months ago:

WINTER WINNINGS -- $2/ticket – “Win up to $20,000!” The largest remaining prize is 1/20^th of that: $1,000. The last top prize was claimed back on January 9, but the game’s “end date” is not until April 4 – so it may be sold for 85 days with no top prize available.

PEPPERMINT PAYDAY -- $3/ticket – “Win up to $50,000” The largest remaining is 1/50^th of that: $1,000. The last top prize was claimed back on January 23, but the game’s “end date” is not until April 11 – so it may be sold for 78 days with no top prize available.

$1 MILLION MEGA MONEY -- $10/ticket – “Win up to $1,000,000”  The largest remaining is 1/20^th of that:  $50,000.  The last top prize was claimed on February 17, but the game’s “end date” is not until April 25 – so it may be sold for 67 days with no top prize available.

TRIPLE DYNAMITE 777 -- $2/ticket – “Win up to $25,000”  The largest remaining prize is 1/25^th of that:  $1,000.  The last top prize was claimed on January 31, but the game’s “end date” is not until April 18 – so it may be sold for 77 days with no top prize available.

PYRAMID OF GOLD -- $10/ticket – “Win up to $500,000”  The largest remaining prize is 1/50^th of that:  $10,000.  The last top prize was claimed on January 17, but the game’s “end date” is not until April 4 – so it may be sold for 77 days with no top prize available.

$2 ILLINOIS JACKPOT -- $2/ticket – “Win up to $25,000”  The last top prize was claimed on November 30, 2022, but the game’s “end date” was not until 76 days later, on February 14.

$10 ILLINOIS JACKPOT -- $10/ticket – “Win up to $1,000,000”  The largest remaining prize is 1/10^th of that:  $100,000.  The last top prize was claimed on January 30, but the game’s “end date” is not until April 18 – so it may be sold for 78 days with no top prize available.

$5 MILLION RICHES – “Win up to $5,000,000” – the largest remaining prize is 1/250^th of that -- $20,000.  The last top prize was claimed back on January 20, but the game’s “end date” is not until April 11 – so it may be sold for 81 days with no top prize available.