Florida lottery – A Florida investigation found many retailers and employees repeatedly claim large scratch-off winnings, raising fraud concerns despite lottery denials.
A string of “winning ticket sold here” notes taped inside Florida convenience stores is drawing fresh scrutiny to how lottery scratch-offs are being cashed in—especially when the biggest winners keep showing up behind the counter.
In southwest Florida. one store owner has publicly displayed dozens of prize sheets. with payouts ranging from $1. 000 to six-figure claims. the report described.. At Nurul Islam’s Sky Food Mart. workers began taping winning notices to red Coca-Cola coolers as the volume of big cash claims mounted.. According to Florida Lottery data, Islam has won more than 100 prizes for $234,000.
The investigation also pointed to a wider pattern across the state: other retailers and their employees appear to be cashing in repeatedly. with some collecting the majority of winning tickets sold at their own stores since 2015.. It found that about 50 Florida store owners cashed in at least half their shops’ winning tickets. all worth $600 or more. and that at least 30 licensed retailers claimed 50 or more winners.
Taken together, the analysis said store owners took home more than $26 million between 2015 and mid-December 2025.. Statisticians and lottery watchdogs say those numbers can be explainable if retailers simply buy tickets in bulk—but they also can be consistent with misconduct when wins are unusually concentrated among the people who control access to the products.
Doubts about “legitimate luck” were underscored by the report’s inclusion of a long-time lottery watchdog. Dawn Nettles. who monitors the Texas Lottery.. Nettles suggested the behavior likely goes beyond legal buying patterns. arguing instead that some retailers may be taking winning tickets from customers who do not realize they have won.. In the report’s account. most players buy a handful of tickets. scratch the barcodes. and then ask the clerk to scan them—leaving customers dependent on the store for whether the ticket is recorded as a winner.
Islam denied any cheating and attributed his results to luck and routine purchases of scratch-off “books.” Fresh Take Florida reporters said they asked multiple times to interview lottery officials and presented lottery management with findings from the analysis. but the Florida Lottery declined to answer questions.. In an email statement, spokeswoman Alecia Collins said the lottery did not have staff available for an interview.
Collins also said the lottery’s security division monitors retailer activity. reviews complaints. and works with State Attorney’s Offices when needed.. She wrote that the division investigates allegations of retailer misconduct or potential fraud. and that when violations are identified. the lottery can pursue administrative. civil. or criminal actions. including arrests. prosecutions. and retailer contract terminations where applicable.
The investigation relied on an extensive dataset of almost 1.5 million winning scratch-off claims dating from 2015 through mid-December 2025, the report said.. Those records included every win of at least $600. a threshold the report described as tied to the minimum amount that triggers IRS reporting for winners.
It also reviewed hundreds of public records, including criminal cases involving people charged with lottery fraud and other crimes.. In Florida’s retail ecosystem. the report suggested. that backdrop is what makes the concentrated winnings among retailers feel less like coincidence and more like a question of how often illegal tactics are occurring.
Some owners claimed they win frequently by buying books of tickets. which can include dozens or even hundreds of individual scratch-offs depending on the game.. In Florida’s Panhandle. store owner Nicholas Zangari told reporters he buys scratch-off books when he sees other customers doing the same.. He credited those bulk buys for taking home more than $90. 000 on 55 winning tickets—nearly half of his store’s wins since 2015. according to the data.
But the report also introduced probabilistic skepticism from mathematicians who reviewed the winnings.. One of those statisticians. Skip Garibaldi. said even $4. 000 a month in ticket spending would not be sufficient for Islam’s level of cash claims. based on the amount of winning tickets at issue.. Garibaldi said Islam would have to spend more than $1. 300 a day since 2015—amounting to roughly $41. 000 a month and $5.4 million total—to match the scale of wins described.
Garibaldi also characterized the results as unusual from a mathematical standpoint.. He reviewed data on some of the state’s top players, along with Nurul Islam’s wins, as reported.. Another mathematician. Will Cipolli. added his own view of how improbable those outcomes are—suggesting that even a one-in-a-million chance at winning that much would require an amount of ticket purchasing far beyond what would appear feasible for a typical retailer.
Cipolli said that to achieve a one-in-a-million shot at winning as much as Islam. a buyer would have to purchase more than 370. 000 tickets. which he described in striking imagery as enough to reach from the ground to the top of the Statue of Liberty if stacked.. He said there is a chance the outcomes could be legitimate. but characterized the observed winnings as beyond what would be considered reasonable.
Lottery officials, the report emphasized, have not accused Islam or Zangari of wrongdoing.. Still. the account described other situations in which retail owners and employees appear to have collected large winnings. including former store owner Ali Idriss of Pompano Beach. who won 117 times for nearly $700. 000 since 2015.. The report said Idriss’ major windfall came in 2018. when he claimed a $500. 000 ticket. and that after winning he sold his gas station and retired early while continuing to play.
In that same mathematical framing, Cipolli calculated that a player would need to scratch nearly 3 million tickets to win as much as Idriss, the report said—enough, if piled, to surpass the Burj Khalifa’s height.
The investigation also described a Gainesville case involving a tobacco store worker listed in the data as winning 21 times at Gators Tobacco.. Owner Mohammed Nazim Uddin told reporters he was surprised by how often the worker won. saying he had a camera monitoring store interactions and had never seen him buy a ticket.. Uddin said he did not believe the worker would steal.. The worker, Mohammed S.. Islam, denied winning 21 times when questioned, saying, “That’s not what happened,” and adding he was not that lucky.
Garibaldi calculated that for the worker to win as often as the data indicated since 2021. he would have had to spend about $150. 000 on lottery tickets—roughly $92 a day.. The report said the math leaves multiple possible explanations open: the owner and employees could be playing heavily. could be buying games still offering top prizes. or might be taking advantage of internal access to winning tickets.
That broader suspicion—centered on whether some retailers can manipulate who gets paid—was paired in the report with documented schemes found in court records.. The most subtle method described was “micro-scratching. ” in which store workers scratch a thin line across a ticket’s barcode with a pin. nail. or even a fingernail.. The report said the line can be enough for the ticket to scan as a winner. allowing the worker to buy or take it; if the ticket scans as a loser. it can be placed back into the rack and sold.
The report said at least one case began with store surveillance.. In 2017. a supervisor at Lake City S & S Food Stores reportedly noticed scratched tickets and. according to his arrest report. security video showed employee Christopher Klopp using his finger to scratch tickets.. The report stated that one ticket scanned as a winner and Klopp took $25 from the register while placing other tickets back in the dispenser.. Klopp was charged with felony altering lottery tickets but the charges were dropped after he completed a pretrial diversion program. according to the report.
Other cases described theft at larger scale. including the report’s account of Rakesh Tanguturi. charged in February with organized fraud and grand theft after allegedly stealing more than $300. 000 worth of scratch-offs from Miami Bargain Stop #2.. The report said the stolen tickets’ prizes offset losses, reducing the total impact claimed in the arrest report to $60,000.. During an interview with law enforcement. the report said Tanguturi admitted the conduct and stated he stole the tickets to cover medical care for his father in India.. Tanguturi did not respond to phone calls in recent weeks, the report stated.
A day after Tanguturi’s arrest. the report described another retail theft case: Penny Marie Cason. the manager at High Springs Pure. was charged with grand theft after allegedly stealing at least $20. 000 in lottery tickets over two months.. Her case is ongoing.. Cason told reporters she struggled with a gambling addiction. describing the lottery as an ever-present temptation and saying it felt like the tickets were “just a piece of cardboard with no value” before they became valuable.
According to the data summarized in the report, Cason cashed in 48 winning tickets for $51,000 since 2018, and last year claimed more than half of all winning tickets sold at High Springs Pure.
Even as the lottery maintains that its security team monitors retailer activity. the investigation highlights how the store-to-customer scanning process can create vulnerability. especially when most players scratch barcodes themselves and then rely on staff for scanning outcomes.. That dynamic can matter whether retailers are buying in high volume or intercepting winners. because the same access that makes legitimate purchasing easy can also make misconduct harder for customers to detect.
From a policy perspective, these cases also point to how enforcement and verification systems interact at the local level.. The report said the lottery’s security division works with State Attorney’s Offices when needed. and that administrative. civil. and criminal actions can follow confirmed violations.. The existence of micro-scratching schemes and large ticket theft allegations in court records suggests why statisticians and watchdogs are asking whether the scale and clustering of retailer wins should trigger deeper review.
For voters and state watchdogs. the issue is less about lottery luck and more about trust in a public-facing retail marketplace.. When winning tickets appear disproportionately in the hands of the people responsible for selling and scanning them. the questions quickly become whether current oversight is deterring misconduct and whether customers have adequate protection from losing tickets that should have been paid out.
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This is exactly why I don’t trust scratch-offs anymore. If store owners and their employees are “winning” over and over, it just smells like a rigged setup, even if the lottery keeps saying it isn’t.
Sarah Johnson, the part that stands out is the concentration—when someone is repeatedly cashing in big claims at their own store, you can’t just hand-wave it as coincidence. Even if random chance can happen, patterns like that are what you’d expect from fraud schemes or at least insider access.
Sure, it’s probably totally normal that “winning ticket sold here” notes are plastered inside convenience stores and the biggest winners are always behind the counter. Shocking how that works out for everyone except the customers. Sarah Johnson and Michael Brown are both right to side-eye this.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I’d at least want tighter oversight and random audits of frequent winners who sell their own tickets. Sarah, this doesn’t feel random.