Want to know if someone’s already won the grand prize?

• Ask the store to print a list of games and remaining prizes.

• Visit www.mainelottery.com. Under the player’s information section, click on “prizes,” then “unclaimed prizes.” The list is updated weekly.

‘Integrity of the games’
Scratch tickets pulled when grand prizes won? State says they should be.

You’ve always wanted a Ford Mustang.

It’s an instant ticket long shot, sure, but the grand prize is tempting and someone’s got to win. Maybe it’ll be you. So you hand over $5 for a scratch ticket and the chance to win the car of your dreams.

But what if someone’s already won? The car’s long gone. Your $5 is gone. And you never had a chance.

To prevent that kind of false hope, the state says it tells stores to stop selling scratch tickets as soon as the game’s biggest prizes have been won.

“It’s an integrity issue as much as anything else,” said Dan Gwadosky, head of the Bureau of Alcoholic Beverages and Lottery Operations.

But a Sun Journal survey of some area stores this week found instant tickets aren’t pulled when the top prizes are gone. Store owners say if there was a memo, they never got it.

“Are you kidding me?” said Luis Morales, owner of Crossroads Market in Auburn. “We continue selling them because there are other prizes people can win.”

Gwadosky said Friday his bureau would look for a way to ensure its 1,300 vendors stop selling tickets when there’s nothing big left to win.

“There’s absolutely no reason for those tickets to be out after the top prize (is gone). If we need to find a way to be more effective, I think that’s what we’re going to have to do,” Gwadosky said.

Scratch tickets and their prizes – or lack thereof – have made national headlines in recent weeks, in part because lawsuits have caused some states to change the way they handle the games. According to USA Today, California, New York and Massachusetts now stop selling tickets once the game’s top prizes are gone.

It estimated that half of the 42 states with lotteries continue to sell tickets with no grand prize.

Officially, Maine has never been one of them, Gwadosky said. The state electronically alerts stores when a game’s top prizes are gone and stores are told to cease those sales, he said.

“Maine has pulled the games, always. That’s just the tack that we take,” he said.

Phil St. Pierre, owner of Victor News in Lewiston – one of the state’s biggest sellers of scratch tickets – said he’d never heard of it.

Unsold tickets

Local store owners said it wouldn’t make sense for them to stop selling tickets because people still like to play for smaller prizes – sometimes worth hundreds or thousands of dollars. St. Pierre recalled a highly publicized car giveaway game that remained popular even after customers heard the cars were gone.

The Maine State Lottery’s Web site lists the games that still have top prizes up for grabs, the number of prizes left and how much they’re worth. The site is updated weekly. Stores can also print out a list with the latest information for players who request it.

Many store owners said they’d lose money if the state made them stop selling tickets after the big prizes were gone. The state won’t take tickets back once the packet’s been opened, they said.

Gwadosky, however, said the state would take back unused tickets, even if the packet – or book of tickets – has been opened. Stores would be issued a refund or credit.

Since Maine pays only for the tickets sold, not the overall number of tickets printed, he said the state would not lose money.

“We really want to err on the side of the players. That’s where you get the integrity of the games,” he said.

Gwadosky said he asked his marketing manager to complete his own survey of vendors. The bureau is also considering ways to ensure stores pull the tickets that are supposed to be pulled and that players know when a game no longer has a grand prize to win. Among the options: print a notice on the back of each ticket reminding players they can ask their seller for a prize list or require stores to publicly post the updated list every day.

Maine made $230 million in lottery sales last year, 70 percent of that from instant tickets.