The NC Lottery announced today, “Thanks to you and your play of lottery games, the lottery raised $670 million in fiscal year 2018 for education programs in North Carolina. That’s the most in a single year ever.”
The state’s lottery website made the following announcement.
Education wasn’t the only big winner. Players won big too as the lottery awarded the most prize money ever, $1.65 billion. Seventy times during the year, players won a prize of $1 million or more. The biggest wins of the year were four $10 million top prizes from the Extreme Million and Ultimate Millions scratch-off games.
In all, lottery ticket sales totaled $2.6 billion at the end of the fiscal year on June 30, according to final but unaudited results. Ticket sales have gone up every year since the lottery started. More and more businesses have joined the lottery as retail partners. The lottery now has 7,021 retail locations across our state.
The results show how much North Carolinians enjoy playing lottery games and winning prizes as they help raise money for a good cause. If you look at one happens every day across the state, you would see:
• $7.1 million a day in sales.
• $4.5 million a day in prizes.
• $1.8 million a day raised for education.
The money raised by the state benefits every county in the state. The additional funds help counties build and repair schools, help North Carolina students cover the costs of college, support school systems and provide pre-school for four-year-olds in every county of the state. At the end of June, the total amount raised since the start of the lottery had climbed past $5.8 billion.
The lottery has safeguards in place to ensure winning tickets are handled correctly, including checks to see how employees at stores that sell lottery tickets follow lottery rules. We just completed a new round of checks and it showed a 99.2 percent compliance rate.
The checks involved a lottery investigator and law enforcement officers from local and state agencies presenting to a retailer a special lottery ticket that looked exactly like the other tickets in a scratch-off game with a prize exceeding $600. All but two of the 247 retailers complied with lottery policies and procedures by telling the undercover investigator posing as a lottery player that the ticket was a winner and the prize must be claimed at a lottery office.
The campaign, conducted between November 2016 and June 2018, checked retail locations in 47 counties and 108 cities and towns.
Two retail employees told the investigator the ticket was a non-winning ticket and kept it. Criminal charges are pending against the retail employees involved in both cases. The lottery also took administrative action, including terminating ticket sales at stores involved in one of the cases.
The NC Lottery announced in November of 2017 equipment was placed in every store either a ticket checker or a lottery vending machine with a ticket checker. The lottery’s smartphone app, the N.C. Lottery Official Mobile App, has a ticket-checking function that allows players to use the app’s camera to scan the ticket’s bar code to see if it is a winner.
By using the ticket checker or the app, players with a prize-winning ticket never has to give it to anyone else until they claim their prize.
To keep your winning tickets secure, you should immediately sign the back of the ticket to establish ownership. You also can help keep our games secure by reporting any suspicious activity or concerns you have to the lottery’s Security Hotline at (888) 732-6235.
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