WASHINGTON -- A woman who says the Virginia Lottery owes her $20,000 after she hit it big with a scratch-off ticket may instead face charges.
On Aug. 22, Ardella Newman claimed a $2 ticket matched the number 16, making it a winner. However, lottery officials said there was a mistake. Newman pressed, saying she won and filing a complaint with the Virginia Lottery.
“I want the money that I thought I won. If you look at the ticket, it says I won this money. It wasn’t anything that I did wrong. It’s what they did wrong,” she told WJLA.
Lottery officials released the findings Wednesday of Newman’s case. They said there were two different issues with that ticket and a previous one Newman attempted to cash. In the case of the $20,000 winning ticket, she’d tried to pass off two different tickets as a winner:
The lottery came to three conclusions:
Another case involving Newman went unreported before Wednesday. In that case, she claimed she’d won $52. Investigators determined she’d taped together portions of two different tickets in order to pass them off as a winning entry. The lottery said Newman admitted to it.