16 not so sweet to instant Lotto players

Three Planet Hollywood employees who pooled money to buy scratch-off lotto tickets found — after they’d apparently won $50,000 — that the trick may be on them.
Hours after he and his friends were “jumping up and down” last August, Johnny Feliciano went over to the Georgia Lottery office, planning to collect the winnings and split them three ways.
But when the woman behind the counter scanned the ticket, the machine didn’t recognize the $2 Jumbo Bucks as a winner.
“I’m like, ‘What’s wrong?’” 25-year-old Feliciano recalls. “And she says, ‘I don’t know. I don’t see what it could be.’”
Attorney Russell Banks filed suit Feb. 5 against the lottery corporation on behalf of the three Planet Hollywood employees asking that the lottery honor the ticket.
The ticket required that Feliciano and friends match one of two numbers — 6 and 15 — with any of the 10 numbers below. And there, below, was the number 6 — with $50,000 printed underneath. The problem was, the number 6 up top should have been printed as a 16. The letters “SXTN” were printed under it.
A week after Feliciano’s supposed win, the lottery pulled from the shelves about 6 million other Jumbo Bucks scratch-off tickets that could have contained errors due to a clogged inkjet.
“I don’t know that that’s going to change our position,” says Banks, who has taken the case on a contingency basis. He says the lottery has yet to prove Feliciano’s ticket contains a misprint.
If the ticket was misprinted, Georgia law would likely protect the lottery from having to pay. The law states: “No prize shall be paid arising from claimed tickets that are ... produced or issued in error ... ”
Furthermore, the lottery corporation states on its website that “if a defective Ticket is purchased, the GLC’s only liability shall be reimbursement for the cost of the void ticket.” The website does not elaborate on what “defective” means.
But it may mean that Feliciano is entitled to $2, not $50,000.