GAINESVILLE, Fla. – Florida Lottery players are leaving huge sums of winning scratch-off tickets uncashed each year.
About $1.1 billion in scratch-off prizes went unclaimed for games that were closed in the past two years, according to state lottery data. Most of that money came from small-prize tickets, those worth less than $600.
Several dozen were life-changing fortunes, each worth $500,000 or more, according to a new data analysis by Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications.
Some players simply don’t cash small prizes, saying the amount is so small it’s not worth the drive to the convenience store. Others lose or misplace their tickets. And some say scratch-off games can be hard to read — leading players to accidentally discard winning tickets.
Crafting complex games happens deliberately and could hurt unsuspecting players, some players and lottery critics say. The harder the games are to understand, the fewer winning tickets are claimed and the more money the lottery keeps, they said.
“The scratch games are very confusing,” said Rob Kohler, a former Texas Lottery employee. “Now there’s so many of them. Players don’t know whether they’re winners or not.”
Prize totals for unclaimed scratch-off tickets in Florida increased from $54 million in fiscal year 2019-20 to $132 million in fiscal year 2022-23, according to the lottery’s annual reports.
It dropped to $60.4 million in fiscal year 2023-24.
For months, Fresh Take Florida reporters requested an interview with Florida Lottery officials.
They declined.
In an email to reporters, spokeswoman Alecia Collins said lottery games are fair.
“The Florida Lottery remains committed to maintaining secure, fair, and transparent operations in support of its mission to fund education and serve the people of Florida,” she wrote.
Confusing tickets
Tickets go unclaimed if they haven’t been cashed 60 days after a game closes. The lottery funnels 80% of unclaimed prize money to the Florida Educational Enhancement Trust Fund, which supports state college and university programs like the Bright Futures Scholarship program.
The remaining money is returned to the prize pool for future games, according to lottery reports.
Tanya Fischer is a stay-at-home mom from central Florida. She posts videos on YouTube under the name “GrandmaScratcher,” where her 105,000 subscribers watch her play an array of colorful tickets decorated with drawings of palm trees, boats and the classic stacks of cash.
Her favorite is a $1 crossword ticket covered in gumballs, she said.
Fischer has played the lottery for decades, but she doesn’t feel like she’s better at reading the tickets. Each scratch-off game has different rules and symbols. To avoid missing out on a winning ticket, she scans each one using the Florida Lottery app, which shows whether the ticket is a winner.
“They change the winning symbols all the time,” said Fischer, whose biggest win came in 2018 when she won $1,000. “On some tickets, they’ll be a winner and other tickets they won't. There are sometimes up to five different ways to win on a ticket.”
Some tickets are hard to understand, Fischer said. But it’s the player’s responsibility to ensure they’re not discarding a winning ticket, she added.
“You need to be scanning every single ticket before you throw it away,” she said.
There are several ways to scan Florida Lottery tickets. They include using the lottery’s app, using self-serve stations in retail stores or asking a clerk at the store’s check-out counter.
Lottery lawsuit
The topic of difficult-to-understand lottery tickets made national news in 2014 when Texas shuttered its “Fun 5's” scratch-off ticket over complaints that the game was deceptive. Players said the game’s wording made it seem like they’d won — but when the tickets scanned, they earned no prize.
Dawn Nettles, a Texas Lottery watchdog since 1992, was among the first to point out the ticket’s confusing nature. After looking into the amount of unclaimed prizes in Texas, she found players often threw out winning tickets without knowing they had won.
“Plain and simple, the player didn't know any better,” Nettles said. “They weren't clearly marked. Well, I call that a deceptive ticket.”
Backlash over the “Fun 5’s” led hundreds of players, including Nettles, to sue the gambling company responsible for the tickets.
But there is a solution, said former Iowa Lottery CEO Terry Rich. Play the game you understand.
Rich, who ran the lottery department for about a decade, acknowledged some games are harder to understand than others. Crossword-style cards can be particularly tough to follow, he said. They involve lots of moving parts, like matching letters to make words and counting those words to reveal prizes. Meanwhile, other games can be as simple as checking a card for winning numbers.
“When you play a game, you want to read the rules and test it out,” he said. “Some people like the real complicated ones, because they think they're getting more of their money's worth. They got some entertainment value out of it.”
In both hard and easy games, the odds are the same, Rich added.
Alejandro Lara, a farm worker from Ocala, spends about $200 a day on lottery tickets. The 38-year-old tends to scan his tickets to double-check if they’re winners, he said — but he sometimes doesn’t bother with tickets that cost under $5.
He also sometimes lets small prizes accumulate over months, though he tries to cash them before they expire. He once missed the deadline to claim a $1,000 winner when he moved out of state.
Some 30,000 scratch-off tickets worth $1,000, like Lara’s, went unclaimed in the previous two years, a Fresh Take Florida data analysis found.
“I scratch the tickets in my car, so I just drop it on the floor of the other side,” he said. “So at the end of the day, sometimes I check them, or sometimes I throw them away.”
Undoubtedly, many ended up in the trash.
Some players, including Lara, have found discarded tickets that turned out to be winners.
For Gainesville resident Ryan Wilkinson, 33, his biggest win — a $500 scratcher — came from the trash. Wilkinson was at a Kwik Stop convenience store on a Wednesday afternoon. He’d just bought a scratch-off.
He stood facing the parking lot, lined with lottery ads and an open trash can full of torn tickets, presumably duds.
But you never know.
“People throw away winners all the time,” he said.
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Kairi Lowery contributed to this reporting. This story was produced by Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. The reporter can be reached at alissagary@ufl.edu. You can donate to support our students here.