A South Carolina lottery error dashed the Christmas cheer for many who thought they had winning tickets on Monday but which turned out to be duds. Two women thought they had won $18,000 and one was planning a trip to Disney World.
The fault lay in a programming error of the South Carolina Education Lottery’s computer system vendor, Intralot, officials said on Tuesday, which resulted in an overabundance of winning tickets being produced, CNN reported.
The glitch impacted Holiday Cash Add-A-Play tickets, a $1 terminal-generated instant game, where the same play symbol was repeated in all nine available play areas on tickets which would result in a top prize of $500, officials said in a statement. For a single play, no more than five identical play symbols should appear.
The error lasted for two hours and the Add-A-Play game was suspended as soon as the error was detected, although it hasn’t been revealed how many tickets were affected or whether any false payouts were made.
"I was happy," Nicole Coggins, who thought she had won, told WYFF. "I was excited. I was calling everyone I knew, 'I won $500.'"
Coggins decided to test her luck and bought another ticket, which was another winner, so she contacted her mother-in-law, Shawanna Ladd, and told her to try the game.
Ladd also racked up the wins and between the two women they had earned $18,000 in winnings.
Coggins told WYFF she got so excited she told her children they were going to take a trip to Disney World and was devastated to learn that the tickets were a sham.
"I had been promising them for years and I thought I would finally get to, and now I can't," she said.
The error didn’t affect instant scratch tickets and other lottery games and officials advised those who purchased a Holiday Cash Add-A-Play ticket on Christmas Day between 5:51 PM to 7:53 PM to hold on to their tickets until a review is completed.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.