A Lotto transaction in Queenstown has been investigated after a Dunedin woman raised concerns about the accuracy of an outlet's ticket-reading machine.
Cathy and Bob Pryde were on holiday in Queenstown when they checked their ticket at the Alpine Four Square supermarket, in Shotover St, on the self-checker, discovering they had not won the big prize as hoped but a bonus ticket.
Collecting the ticket, they were told by the machine operator who had scanned it, that it was not a winning ticket. However, after they pointed out what the self-checker had told them, it was re-scanned and they found they had won a bonus ticket.
''The staff seemed quite surprised; they'd never seen that happen before.''
Mrs Pryde said the Easter incident had concerned her and made her wonder if it was not a one-off.
''How many times has this showed people they had not won when they could have?''
After a query from the Otago Daily Times, New Zealand Lotteries investigated the transaction as its monitoring system was able to track the Pryde's tickets and found it was due to operator error - the ticket had popped up as being misread but the operator treated it as a scanned unsuccessful ticket.
New Zealand Lotteries corporate communications manager Emilia Mazur said the agency took the integrity of its gaming system extremely seriously and it was constantly being monitored.
''NZ Lotteries has the largest retail network in New Zealand with almost 5000 trained Lotto operators producing and checking well over a million lottery tickets for our different games each week, and unfortunately an occasional operator error can occur.''
Lotteries regularly followed up with its retailers to ensure all Lotto operators were appropriately trained and understood the proper process for checking tickets, she said.
Mrs Pryde said she was surprised how Lotteries was able to track her ticket and was pleased to hear it was not a machine fault.
