You have 3 possibilities of what happened and 2 are very shady:
- The ticket was thrown away.
- The lottery closed the game because they are allowed if all tickets have been sent out.
- The lotteries are using shady practices and in this case see below:
This is something that the lotteries should be sued upon, because it's a loophole that can allow a lottery to legally destroy jackpot tickets. This is something I had to do a lot of research to figure out how exactly all the top prizes were not being claimed.
In my state when games are pulled from the vending machines they are left activated. This also applies to any business that looses their lottery license or a business that changes a corporate name. They come pick up the tickets and destroy all of the half activated rolls. The reason they are left activated is due to the fact that rolls are activated/deactivated per "roll" and their excuse is they have to leave them activated to allow any winning tickets previously sold on the roll to be claimed. They use the excuse of lazy accounting for leaving the rest of the roll activated. They then take them to the warehouse and shred them. Once they are shredded then are then incinerated. The obvious problems with this are tenfold. If a jackpot ticket is among those not bought off the roll it is destroyed and left on the books. The problem with this is that it's illegal especially in our state to misrepresent the amount of remaining jackpot prizes.
http://www.wthr.com/story/5898560/hoosier-lottery-faces-lawsuit-over-scratch-off-tickets By law they have to post the amount of remaining prizes on the books and they lost this lawsuit, because of an accounting error on the number of prizes remaining. This was back in 2007. The state refunded all money in this case.
The reason I figured out that the lottery was likely corrupt was due to this case.
http://www.wthr.com/story/28880187/three-hoosier-lottery-millionaires-accused-of-stealing-the-winning-tickets
Basically if you read between the lines on this story if the lotteries don't want a prize to be claimed they could "potentially" send a jackpot ticket to a vending machine in the basement of your local sports arena knowing the sales of this machine are very low so likely hood of the prize ever getting claimed before the roll of tickets being sold is very low. Long story short the lottery sent a jackpot ticket to a store that was going to loose their lottery license. The reason I believe they knew to investigate this couple was the fact they knew where this prize was going and intentionally sent their in the hopes the roll would be activated and not sold so it could be destroyed. The irony in the hole thing is that the state impounded all the winnings, however there should be a counter suit to the state for the prize being put back in the game or the money awarded to the players of the game.
One last shady thing lotteries are doing to increase sales is this:
https://www.hoosierlottery.com/games/scratch-offs/current-games/2121-hot-5s-hot-streak
Closing games after selling almost half the tickets with all top prizes remaining. The reason they are legally allowed to do this is to a little known law in our state about sales numbers. If they presale the front of all the pools and release enough games they can decrease sales to a point on this game they are allowed by law to close the game. The lottery controls for the most part what games the stores get based on their number of ticket displays. The reason I figured this out was due to the fact a holiday game was closed with 7/10 top prizes remaining and about 20% of tickets remaining. There needs to be a complete investigation of these lotteries, because with a license to print money thier is a great need for accountability and with most of the above processes unknown states can continue to boost their numbers, but hurt themselves in the long run. There is no explanation that can be given for the game above being closed with almost half the tickets sold with none of the top prizes ever being released.
Post your thoughts.