Man Sues DC Lottery After Not Winning $340M Jackpot

John Cheeks says lottery website posted wrong numbers as the winners, but he still wants his cash
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Feb 19, 2024 9:35 AM CST
Powerball Site Told Him He'd Won Millions. Except He Hadn't
A display panel advertises tickets for a Powerball drawing at a convenience store in Renfrew, Pennsylvania, on Nov. 7, 2022.   (AP Photo/Keith Srakocic, File)

When John Cheeks checked his Powerball numbers the day after the Jan. 7, 2023, drawing, he saw them listed as the winning combination on the DC Lottery's website, with a $340 million jackpot at stake. "I got a little excited, but I didn't shout, I didn't scream," the DC man tells NBC Washington. He notes that he called a friend, then "took a picture as he recommended, and that was it. I went to sleep." Now, however, lottery officials say those numbers appeared on the website in error, and Cheeks is suing for what he says are his rightful winnings, mistake or no.

Cheeks says in his complaint that when he went to a local retailer a few days later to redeem his ticket, he was rebuffed. He notes the same thing happened at DC's Office of Lottery and Gaming, where a claims staffer told him to toss the ticket. A letter from lottery administrators cited in court documents informed Cheeks his ticket was denied because it didn't "validate as a winner by the OLG's gaming system as required by OLG regulations," per the Guardian. Cheeks' attorney, Richard Evans, says his client was eventually told that contractor Taoti Enterprises—named in Cheeks' suit, along with Powerball and the DC Lottery—accidentally posted the wrong winning numbers on DC Lottery's website.

Taoti's Brittany Bailey said in a court declaration that Taoti staffers were testing a task performed in different time zones and had posted fake winning numbers the day before the drawing to what they thought was a staging site not seen by the public. Instead, they'd posted it to the actual DC Lottery site. The wrong numbers were taken down on Jan. 9, per Bailey.

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Evans notes, per NBC: "Even if a mistake was made, the question becomes: What do you do about that?" The attorney cites a similar case in Iowa, though one involving a lot less cash, when the Iowa Lottery posted the wrong winning numbers last fall, but the mistaken winners were still permitted to keep their prizes, which fell between $4 and $200. "There is a precedent for this ... where a mistake was admitted to by a contractor and they paid the winnings out," Evans notes. (More Powerball stories.)

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