Pennsylvania Woman Must Return $4M Lottery Ticket: Judge

PENNSYLVANIA — A state superior court has ruled in favor of Acme Markets' claim to a $4.15 million winning lottery ticket that went unsold before being purchased by a store employee after the winning numbers had already been announced.

In a ruling issued Dec. 15, Judge Mary Jane Bowes dismissed an appeal filed by Beverlie Seltzer, a former longtime employee at the Doylestown Acme, who argued that she was the purchaser and therefore sole proprietor of the winning ticket.

The case dates back to March 21, 2019, when a customer walked into the Doylestown grocery store and requested five PA Match 6 tickets. The cashier used the lottery terminal to print one ticket with five sets of numbers on it, with each set costing $2. After reviewing the ticket, the customer rejected it and asked Acme to print five separate tickets for him, and the rejected ticket was added to a pile of "mistake tickets" that are kept by the store as a matter of policy, according to court documents.

Later in the day, Seltzer came in for her shift. Shortly after the Match 6 drawing that evening, Seltzer began scanning the pile of mistake tickets and noticed one of them was a winning ticket in the amount of $4.15 million. Instead of leaving the ticket for the coordinator to process the next day — which both Seltzer and Acme agreed is store policy — Seltzer took $10 in cash out of her purse, rang up her own transaction and put the $10 in the register and took the ticket. She then reportedly told her co-workers she won the lottery, signed the back of the winning ticket and turned it in to collect her winnings. (Acme received a $10,000 bonus check as a result of selling the winning ticket.)

After reviewing security tapes, Acme filed a complaint in court on April 6, 2019, to determine the proper owner of the ticket, and a trial court ordered the lottery winnings be placed in escrow until the case was resolved.

Lawyers for Acme noted that they are not authorized to sell a lottery ticket to a customer after ascertaining whether it is a winning ticket, while Seltzer maintained that Acme failed to provide evidence that it had a property right to the ticket.

In November 2019, the court ruled that Acme was the rightful owner of the ticket, and Seltzer appealed the case.

In its most recent ruling, the state superior court found Seltzer's legal arguments "to be devoid of merit":

"Seltzer acknowledged that no Acme representative would sell a ticket to a customer after ascertaining its post-drawing value, and that she herself had never done so," Judge Mary Jane Bowes wrote in the ruling. "Further, every other time she had scanned mistake tickets after a drawing, she discarded the losers and kept the winners for Acme to claim. When Ms. Seltzer in this instance deviated from the Acme procedures that she usually followed, she acted surreptitiously and was not forthcoming about the circumstances of the purchase...Even viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to Ms. Seltzer, no reasonable fact-finder could conclude that Ms. Seltzer acted with the good-faith belief that she was permitted by law or by Acme's policies to give Acme $10 in exchange for $4,150,000."

You can read the court decision in its entirety here.

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