Fort Myers, Fla. – Pinned to the white, faded walls of a convenience store in southwest Florida are more than 20 sheets of paper with the words “winning ticket sold here” printed in big, red block letters.
Some tout $1,000 payouts. Others feature amounts like $5,000, $12,000 and even $60,000 in prizes claimed. The store has sold so many winning lottery tickets, workers have started taping the papers to the sides of red Coca-Cola coolers.
Nurul Islam owns the store and has won his fair share of Sky Food Mart’s big prizes — more than 100 of them for $234,000, according to Florida Lottery data.
Other owners, the keepers of the tickets, defied the odds and cashed in big, too, repeatedly, according to an investigation by Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications.
In fact, some store owners are among the state’s most prolific scratch-off winners or have claimed the majority of their store’s winning tickets since 2015 — a pattern that sounds alarm bells to statisticians and lottery watchdogs.
About 50 store owners in Florida cashed in at least half their store’s winning tickets, all worth $600 or more, according to an analysis of state data. And at least 30 licensed lottery retailers claimed 50 or more winners.
All told, lottery store owners took home more than $26 million between 2015 and mid-December 2025, data show.
It’s possible store owners are spending bundles, legally buying rolls of tickets, said Dawn Nettles, a watchdog to the Texas Lottery since 1992. But Nettles doubts they’re doing that, she said.
Rather, they’re likely stealing tickets from their own customers — people who never expect to win in the first place.
Most players, Nettles said, don’t actually play the games. Rather, they buy a handful of tickets, scratch the barcodes and ask the person behind the counter to scan them.
“The player doesn't know he's won, and they tell him it's a loser,” she said. “And then they take it and cash it in.”
But Nurul Islam said he doesn’t cheat, and he’s just lucky.
Fresh Take Florida reporters asked multiple times to interview lottery officials, even presenting the lottery with some of their findings. Still, lottery officials declined to answer reporters’ questions about the findings.
The Florida Lottery did not have staff available for an interview, said spokeswoman Alecia Collins in an email.
But she said the lottery’s security division monitors retailer activity, reviews complaints and works with the state attorney’s offices when needed.
“The Division also investigates reports of retailer misconduct or potential fraud, and when violations are identified, appropriate administrative, civil, or criminal actions are taken, including arrests, prosecutions, and retailer contract terminations where applicable,” Collins wrote.
Buying books by the bulk: ‘A bad habit’
To investigate how often lottery retailers won, reporters analyzed a dataset of almost 1.5 million winning scratch-off claims from 2015 through mid-December 2025. Records included every win of at least $600, which is the minimum amount the IRS requires lottery winners to report.
Reporters also examined hundreds of public records, including criminal court cases where authorities charged Floridians with lottery fraud and other crimes.
As for store owners, some said they won so frequently by purchasing books of tickets. A book can include dozens or a few hundred tickets, depending on the game.
In Florida’s Panhandle, store owner Nicholas Zangari credits his luck to just that.
At his roadside sports bar in downtown Pensacola, Zangari buys scratch-off books when he sees other customers doing the same, he said
He said that’s the reason he took home more than $90,000 on 55 winning tickets –- or nearly half of his store’s wins since 2015, data show.
But few owners have won more at their store than Nurul Islam in Fort Myers, who has cashed in 118 tickets, or 45% of his shop’s winners.
Like Zangari, Nurul Islam attributed his luck to buying books of scratch-offs.
Each month, he said he spends $3,000 to $4,000 on tickets. He called it “a bad habit.”
“Sometimes I stop for a couple weeks,” he said. “I don’t touch it because I know how much I’m losing … And then I do it again.”
But, according to mathematician Skip Garibaldi, even $4,000 a month wouldn’t be enough to net Nurul Islam’s 118 wins.
For Nurul Islam to win as much as he did, he’d have to spend more than $1,300 a day since 2015, or $41,000 a month, said Garibaldi, a former mathematics professor at Emory University and former associate director of the Institute for Pure & Applied Mathematics at UCLA.
That’s $5.4 million total.
“I was quite shocked at the number of prizes that some of these people claimed,” said Garibaldi, who reviewed the wins of some of the state’s top players. “It’s unusual from my perspective.”
Garibaldi was one of two statisticians who reviewed data on some of Florida’s biggest winners. The other was Will Cipolli, an associate professor of mathematics at Colgate University.
So how improbable are Nurul Islam’s wins, according to Cipolli?
Just to have a one in a million shot at winning that much, he would have to buy more than 370,000 tickets, or enough to reach from the ground to the top of the Statue of Liberty, Cipolli calculated.
Sure, there’s a chance they could be legitimate, Cipolli said.
“But it's just, it's beyond, beyond reasonable," he said.
Lottery officials have not accused Nurul Islam or Zangari of any wrongdoing.
When the house gets lucky
Zangari and Nurul Islam weren’t the only store owners — or their employees — to win big, data show.
Former retail owner Ali Idriss of Pompano Beach won 117 times for nearly $700,000, since 2015. His windfall came in 2018 when he claimed a $500,000 ticket.
The prize allowed Idriss to sell his gas station, retire early and continue to play, he said.
“I can afford to play,” said Idriss when asked about his wins.
More than two-thirds of Idriss’ wins came after he won $500,000, data show.
To expect to win as much as Idriss, a player would have to scratch nearly 3 million tickets, Cipolli calculated. If stacked on top of each other, those tickets would surpass the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, which stands at 2,717 feet, or just over half a mile.
In Gainesville, Mohammed S. Islam won 21 times at the tobacco store where he works.
Gators Tobacco, in the heart of downtown Gainesville, features a long wooden counter lining its right side. In it are 29 visible rolls of scratch off tickets — the most expensive costing $30.
Mohammed Nazim Uddin owns the store, and told a Fresh Take Florida reporter he was surprised to hear how often Mohammed S. Islam won — especially because he has a camera monitoring all the store’s interactions and has never seen him buy a ticket.
“He didn’t play on my recording…You never know, maybe he won,” he said, adding that Mohammed S. Islam would never steal.
When questioned by a reporter, Mohammed S. Islam denied winning 21 times, even though Mohammed S. Islam, of Waldo, is listed in the data as winning that often.
“That’s not what happened,” he said. “I’m not that lucky.”
Mohammed S. Islam said he spends about $10 every week on scratch-off tickets when he fills his gas tank. But Gators Tobacco — the only store he has won at — does not sell gas.
Garibaldi calculated that Mohammed S. Islam would have to spend about $150,000 on lottery tickets since 2021 to win as often as he did. That’s roughly $92 a day.
It’s possible store owners and their clerks are playing a lot or increasing their odds by playing games with the top prizes still available, Garibaldi said.
It’s also possible that owners or their employees are stealing tickets, either from the store or from unsuspecting players, he said.
“Judging by the number who would get caught doing it, it (stealing) is still very popular,” he said.
Lottery officials have not accused Mohammed S. Islam or Idriss of any wrongdoing.
The gatekeepers to potential riches
Hundreds of pages of court records detail how lottery retailers, and their employees, beat staggering odds — illegally. Sometimes their customers pay the price.
Perhaps the most subtle scheme is called micro-scratching. Micro-scratching happens when a store worker uses a pin, nail or even a fingernail to scratch a thin line across the ticket’s barcode. Sometimes that hard-to-see line is all that’s needed to scan the ticket.
If the ticket scans as a winner, the worker buys or takes it. If it’s a loser, the worker puts it back in the rack and sells the ticket to an unsuspecting customer.
In 2017, a Lake City S & S Food Stores supervisor noticed some tickets had been scratched. Store security video showed Christopher Klopp, an employee, using his finger to scratch tickets, according to his arrest report.
One scanned as a winner, and Klopp took $25 out of the register and put it in his pocket. He put the other tickets back in the dispenser, the report said.
Klopp told investigators that a previous employee taught him the scam.
Klopp was charged with felony altering lottery tickets but had the charges dropped after completing a pretrial diversion program, records show.
He couldn’t be reached by phone or email for comment.
Investigators caught other store employees blatantly stealing tickets worth hundreds of thousands.
In February, police charged Rakesh Tanguturi with organized fraud and grand theft after he stole more than $300,000 worth of scratch-off tickets from Miami Bargain Stop #2, the store he managed.
Prizes from the winning tickets offset the losses, dropping the total to $60,000, an arrest report states.
During an interview with law enforcement, Tanguturi admitted to his crimes, saying that he stole the tickets because he needed to pay for medical care for his now-deceased father in India.
Tanguturi did not respond to numerous phone calls seeking comment in recent weeks.
A day after Tanguturi’s arrest, Penny Marie Cason, store manager at High Springs Pure, was charged with grand theft after stealing at least $20,000 in lottery tickets over a span of two months. Her case is ongoing.
Cason said she struggled with a gambling addiction. The lottery was an ever-present temptation, one that almost didn’t feel real, she said.
“It's like the tickets were just a piece of cardboard with no value,” Cason said. “It was a complete disconnect. It's like going to the casino and you bet with chips.”
Cason cashed in 48 winning tickets for $51,000 since 2018, data show.
Last year, she claimed more than half of all the winning tickets sold at High Springs Pure.
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This story was produced by Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. The reporters can be reached at kairilowery@ufl.edu and landerson2@ufl.edu. You can donate to support our students here.