System delay causes incorrect lottery information

CTV Edmonton: System glitch for lotto draw Western Canadian Lottery Corporation says a glitch in their system means winning tickets may not have been correctly identified.

The Western Canadian Lottery Corporation (WCLC) is advising customers to recheck their tickets following a system problem.

Officials said a delay in the draw results may mean that winning tickets weren’t correctly identified.

“They weren’t released to the system until 10:35 yesterday morning. When normally they would be available as the retailors were opening their stores,” WCLC stakeholder relations director, Amanda Marantz, explained.

Something that Gilles Caron found out the hard way.

Caron told CTV News that he checked his tickets at a kiosk first thing Saturday and received a slip that read ‘appears not to be a winner’.

“Normally I would have thrown those tickets away or leave them to the teller,” he explained, but this time he held on to them.

“I was doubting that I didn’t win anything not even a ticket- a free ticket. I’ve bought some of those in the past and most of the times I win something.

“I checked them again at the 7-11 on the south side and one was a $12 winner and the other was a $2 winner.”

He said he was very disappointed in the WCLC as many customers check their tickets early the day after the draw.

“How many hundreds of dollars were not claimed because of this? How many tickets were thrown away?”

The delay affected Lotto Max, Western Max and the Extra draws and Marantz said they did their best to notify customers.

“We did have a message up on our website immediately. We did send a message out to the retailers right away to let them know that they wouldn’t be able to validate those games.”

Marantz said the WCLC always advised customers to keep their tickets.

“We tell people that when they check their ticket at a retailer to always get their ticket back and get the validation slip so that they can be sure that they are matching and that they understand what the results of that check was.”

Those who think they may have tossed out a winning ticket have been told to call, 1-800-665-3313 or visit the WCLC website.

However, tracking tickets is a tricky job, Marantz cautioned.

“We really can only track down the tickets if you give us all the information about them. That would include where you bought the ticket and what time of day you bought the ticket and any other tickets you bought along with it because that allows us to find the particular transaction that you are talking about.”

With files from Amanda Anderson