A Washington, D.C., man suing the D.C. Lottery and Powerball is seeking a hefty payout of what he believes is his rightful winnings after a lawsuit claims the companies denied him a $340 million prize last year after his ticket numbers appeared online.
John Cheeks, who’s lived in D.C. for over 40 years, says he purchased a Powerball ticket on Jan. 6, 2023, and played a combination of his relative’s birth dates and other meaningful numbers, he told WRC-TV.
“I’m not a regular, except for when the jackpot goes up,” he told the news outlet.
The drawing occurred the next day on Jan. 7, and Cheeks says the winning numbers — “which I have,” as he wrote in the complaint — were posted to the D.C. Lottery’s website that day, though he did not check for the winning numbers until Jan. 8.
He saw that the numbers on his Powerball ticket matched the numbers displayed on the D.C. Lottery’s website, he said.
“I got a little excited, but I didn’t shout, I didn’t scream,” he recalled to the news outlet after seeing his numbers match what appeared on his laptop screen.
“I just politely called a friend. I took a picture as he recommended, and that was it. I went to sleep,” Cheeks told WRC-TV.
The complaint claimed the numbers that matched Cheeks’ ticket appeared on the D.C. Lottery’s site for three days, and at that time, the Powerball prize stood at $340 million.
The chances of winning the grand prize are one in 292.2 million, according to Powerball’s website.
When Cheeks went to redeem his ticket on Jan. 10 at the D.C. Office of Lottery and Gaming, he was told they wouldn’t honor the ticket “because it was an error posted on their public website and the internet-posted numbers of Powerball could not be redeemed,” according to the complaint.
Cheeks said he was told, “Hey, this ticket is no good. Just throw it in the trash can,’” WRC-TV reported.
Instead of discarding it, Cheeks kept it in a safe place and contacted a lawyer.
The complaint says the D.C. Lottery had first posted the winning Powerball numbers from Jan. 7 through Jan. 9 that Cheeks had purchased and later removed them.
Cheeks claims through the lawsuit that the lottery companies republished different Powerball numbers without placing any public service announcement on their website regarding the change.
According to Cheeks’ attorney, Richard Evans, a lottery contractor eventually told Cheeks that Taoti Enterprises, a digital advertising agency responsible for managing the D.C. Lottery’s site — was responsible for the error of posting the incorrect numbers, according to WRC-TV.
Taoti Enterprises is also named in the complaint filed in November.
Evans has said he has not seen evidence to support that a Taoti Enterprises contractor made a mistake.
“Even if a mistake was made, the question becomes: What do you do about that?” Evans said, according to WRC-TV. “There is a precedent for this, a similar case that happened in Iowa, where a mistake was admitted to by a contractor and they paid the winnings out.”
In that case, Iowa lottery officials said the posted wrong numbers impacted prizes between $4 and $200, and that whomever cashed in a winning ticket during the seven hours that the wrong numbers were posted could keep the money, KMSP-TV reported.
