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Jul 10, 2004, 3:34 am (10 comments)
Post office colleagues of a man who won $175,000 in the Mega Millions lottery drawing say they were cheated out of a share of the prize.
For nearly four years, 20 co-workers in suburban Olmsted Falls, Ohio chipped in $5 a week to buy lottery tickets. The group says they hit on five of six numbers drawn June 25.
However, Stephen Kyle of Amherst said he had bought the winning ticket on his own. The $100 he spent on tickets for the lottery club, Kyle said, yielded a single $2 winner.
"I told them the truth, but apparently some of them didn't believe me," Kyle, 51, said Friday after hearing that he had been sued in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court.
"There's no way in the world I'd cheat those guys. They're all my friends. Now it seems that some of them are and some of them aren't," he said.
The club members said they became suspicions after Kyle failed to provide photocopies of tickets he bought for them.
Seven club members sued Kyle on Thursday for their share of the money they claim is theirs, plus damages as compensation for causing anxiety, emotional distress, embarrassment and inconvenience.
Lottery Post Staff
This is why I don't like lottery pools! I'm strictly solo -- no friends, no family, and no enemies!
dphilliips (Blue)
The rule I use is to never buy tickets for yourself when you are the organizer of a lottery pool. Even if you photocopy tickets you are still suspected.
The benefits of pools offset the portential problems if you run them correctly.
Good luck,
Jake
There will always be so loser that claims they were cheated. There will be someone that didn't pay to play in the pool that week and then sue claiming that they always play and that someone else should have put in the money for them.
My rules is if you don't pay, you don't play. If your name isn't on my list, you missed out for the week. I photocopy all the tickets and everyone gets a copy... you can also give the serial numbers off the ticket to them as well to show them that all tickets were bought together.
Buy your own tickets at another time, and possible, at another location. In court that will help to show that it wasn't a group purchase.
Don't play a pool where you don't get a copy of the numbers!
Should have had someone tag along with him as a witness...
.... then again, that's why I'm not in any pool that goes on. Mana flies solo ^^;
Just goes to show what people will do. I do not believe the buyer. He should have put the tickets bought for the club in a separate envelope and also provided copies of the tickets if that was a past practice. Someting stinks. Only trust the one you can trust, YOURSELF.
I've been playing in lottery pools for years. Because of the number of lawsuits resulting from situations like this one, I added a paragraph to whatever we use to distribute the numbers to everyone in the pool. It states "...will share funds won only on these sets of numbers. No one in the pool will have a claim on another's winnings from tickets purchased individually or as part of another pool." This way, if you forgot to buy your ticket for the drawing when our pool wins, you're not on the list of players and you don't share in the winnings. And if my personal numbers win I've got proof that everybod knew the rules when we played.
Everyone laughed at me when I started doing this, but stories like this one prove that it's a good idea. It may not stop somebody from suing you but it might help if you have to go to court. No matter how much people trust each other, money makes people to funny things.
Unless I had complete proof that the winning numbers were not part of the pool, I would offer $4000 to any of them who signed a piece of paper agreeing to drop the suit. They will still feel ripped off, but they'll probably take it. Let's face it, each of them would have only got $8750 anyway and lawyers will eat through $175,000 quickly.
I think some people would file a suit even if they knew they didn't deserve any of your money hoping you would make them an offer to just get rid of the aggravation. The bad thing if you do that then you give them grounds to convict a court that they really deserve an equal share and you could end up paying them even more. It like pleading no contest to a crime you didn't commit because it's cheaper than the expense of defending yourself , you still have to pay the fine.
RJOh
I use run a lottery pool for years where I work. We had a rule, and everyone in the pool knew it. As a matter of fact, those that wasn't interested in playing knew it as well in case I needed an unbiased witness. And the rule was, I bought the tickets for the group in the city in which we all worked. (most of us that worked there were commuters from small towns). Any ticket that I purchased in the city was fair game to all, but any tickets that were purchased in my small home town were my tickets and my tickets alone. It worked out pretty well. If you happen to live in a large city you could do the same thing except with using certain stores for the rule. If purchased at "X" store it's your. If purchased at "Y" store it is fair game to all. Just make sure everybody and their dog knows the rule.