A Woman Won $20,000 from a Scratch-Off Ticket But With a Disappointing Reversal of Fortune.
COOPER: Time now for the return of the RidicuList. It's been a while. Tonight, we have a tale illustrating the time-honored aphorism of the easy come, easy go. A woman named Ardella recently bought $2 scratch-off lottery ticket from a machine at a grocery store in Alexandria, Virginia and was thrilled when she found that she matched one of the numbers and won $20,000.</s>ARDELLA NEWMAN: I saw that $20,000, you don't know how excited I was. I have a sister that's in Syracuse. She's very sick. I could help her with her medical bills.</s>COOPER: So that's really sweet. She wants to use the money to help her sister, but (inaudible) was not to be because even though the ticket clearly shows that Ardella won $20,000, when she went to collect her winnings, lottery officials told her that instead of the $20,000 they would be giving her zero dollars. They said there was a mistake and the ticket was issued in error. I will let the reporter from our affiliate, WJLA explain the particulars, but let's just say I'm not sure I want to live in a world where you can't even trust your scratch-off tickets anymore.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is what a normal ticket is supposed to look like with the winning numbers at the top. This is the ticket that Newman bought with the winning numbers at the bottom suggesting the machine just cut the cards in the wrong spot.</s>COOPER: Yikes. Just like that, like so much silver scratch-off dust blowing onto the winds of injustice. Ardella was denied her prize because the machine maybe cut the ticket in the wrong spot. What I would like to know is how that qualifies as Ardella's problem and not a Virginia lottery problem. And she would like to know that, as well.</s>NEWMAN: I want the money that I thought I won. If you look at the ticket, it says I won this money. It want wasn't anything that I did wrong. It was what they did wrong.</s>COOPER: I couldn't agree more. Totally team Ardella here, not since the Conner's won the lottery on Roseanne have I seen such a disappointing reversal of fortune. This seems like a no-brainer to me. Ardella bought the ticket, scratched off the thing, the thing said she won so give her the money. Ardella has filed a complaint with the Virginia Lottery which is investigating. I can only hope they are sending out their top lottery detectives to collect evidence and dust for fingerprints or whatever one dust for. And that this is strictly resolved in Ardella's favor so she...