The Lotto Matrix: Scientific Games And New York Lottery Renew Partnership, Ohio Lottery Reveals Full Details Behind Cyber Attack, More

Welcome to this week’s “Lotto Matrix,” a weekly Friday compilation of the lottery industry’s most significant, interesting, or absurd happenings.

Still going strong after All These Years

Scientific Games and the New York Lottery will renew their vows and continue offering scratch-off tickets in the state of New York through a new primary contract, they announced Monday. The partners have been together since 1976 and, through the success of their scratch-off games, have raised billions of dollars for education in the state.

The deal makes sense for both sides as Scientific Games’ scratch-off tickets have helped the New York Lottery earn some of the highest lottery profits, according to La Fleur’s 2024 World Almanac. Scientific Games has been able to use partnerships like the one it has with New York to create an offering of games that appeal to customers with different types of budgets.

“The New York Lottery is proud to continue its partnership with Scientific Games,” said Gweneth Dean, director of the New York Lottery. “For decades, our collaboration has resulted in billions of dollars for New York’s public schools, and we look forward to creating exciting new games for our players and supporting our dedicated retailers across the state.”

The new contract will see Scientific Games doing its usual share of duties along with “consumer and product research and data analytics, game development and portfolio planning.”

“We’re honored to continue as the primary scratch-off game provider to one of the world’s most successful lotteries and support their important mission to fund education for New York students,” said John Schulz, president of Americas and global instant products for Scientific Games. “Our long-standing, strategic partnership has continued to bring entertaining scratch experiences to players in the state, and we look forward to many more decades of success together.”

Ohio Lottery ransomware attack Update

The Ohio Lottery’s cybersecurity experts have assessed the damage caused by the cyber attack launched on them last December and found that it affected at least 538,959 lottery players, compromising full names, other personal identifiers, and Social Security numbers.

Although law enforcement has not confirmed who exactly carried out the attack, a ransomware gang called DragonForce claimed responsibility.

“More than 3,000,000+ entries, first name, last name, mail, addresses, winning amounts! SSN + DOB records of employees and players,” DragonForce claimed. “The total weight of the leak when unpacked is about 600+ gigabytes.”

On Jan. 22, DragonForce provided another update on its dark-web site, saying that negotiations failed and that it would leak multiple files containing player data allegedly stolen from the lottery’s internal systems.

“Ohio Lottery themselves were warned that people could suffer, which in general apparently does not bother them at all, these are the consequences of negligence,” DragonForce’s post read.

On April 5, the Ohio Lottery confirmed the breach and its consequences. However, there was a disagreement on how much information was stolen. The ransomware gang claimed over 1.5 million players’ and employees’ personal information was compromised, while the lottery has given a more conservative number that hovers around 500,000.

“We have no evidence that any of your information has been or will be misused as a direct result of this incident,” the Lottery said in its letter to impacted individuals.

“Out of an abundance of caution,” the Ohio Lottery is offering 12 months of free credit monitoring and identify theft protection services through IDX, which helps detect possible misuse of personal information and resolve identity theft. Individuals who enroll in the program will not have their credit score impacted, the lottery said.

Canada nice

How would you spend the money in you won the lottery? Richmond News in Richmond, British Columbia, Canada, ran a small-scale poll and found 44% said they would use the money to help out family and friends. 

The second most popular answer, somewhat surprisingly, was that they would live life as before. 

That was followed by traveling the world, quitting their job, and starting a charitable organization.  

The poll was conducted between March 25 to May 10, and of the 1,516 respondents, 490 were from within the community.

Everything happens for a reason

This is the best mistake Cynthia Harris ever made.

She was playing around with the North Carolina Education Lottery’s digital instant lottery offerings. The app has a “demo” feature, allowing players to see how the game works, and Harris said that, by mistake, she played a real game instead of a demo … and she won a $736,874 prize playing a new digital instant game called Bison Bonanza.

This particular game features a progressive jackpot that can be won anytime. Harris played a $2 ticket and won the top-level “Epic jackpot.” The odds of that win are 1 in 15.5 million.

“I was like, ‘Wait, how did this just happen?’” she recalled. “It still hasn’t set in yet.”

The jackpot represents the largest digital instant win since the North Carolina Lottery began offering digital instant games last November.

“I am a blessed person,” Harris said.

Three’s company

Forget about the Doritos; the next time customers go to this grocery store in Spokane, Washington, they may want to buy some lottery tickets. Yoke’s Fresh Market, located at 9329 E. Montgomery Avenue in Spokane Valley, sold not one, not two, but three high-value winning lottery tickets in just one calendar week.

The Washington Lottery said the rare run of luck began on April 17, when the store sold the sole winning ticket for the $4.6 million Lotto jackpot.

“Since they sold that top-tier winning lottery ticket, the store received a $46,000 retailer selling bonus from Washington’s Lottery,” said a press release.

Employees at the store were “very excited and shocked,” the release said, and they planned on having a “small get-together with the entire team to celebrate.”

Less than a week later, the store sold two more winning tickets. One of the winners was a HIT 5 ticket worth $165,000, and another was a Powerball ticket that won $200,000 — a $50,000 hit with a 4x multiplier bonus by a local identified as “M.L.”

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