When the news got out that Illinois failed to pay their winning lottery tickets, families and residents are outraged and demand justice. Many of the winners have sought legal help to fight back against the state that stole their dreams away from them.
One attorney, Tom Zimmerman, has started representing some of the winners and claims that Illinois has failed to pay out $288 million in lottery prizes.
What happened? Illinois blamed their failure on their ‘budget crisis’. And if anyone won more than $600 from a lottery ticket, the state refused point-blank to pay it. Nevertheless, television ads continue to run and promote the lottery to millions of residents. Is this fair? No! Learn more below!
Why should residents be punished for the state’s budget crisis? Or if they really are too broke to pay out lottery winnings, why are they still selling tickets?
One female lottery winner, Susan Rick, opened up about how the State screwed her out of thousands during an interview with Inside Edition.
Rick said: “We won. We finally can have a comfortable life. Suddenly you’re gonna pull the rug out from under us. We had a ticket for $250,000.”
Rick and her family are not the only ones who have been punished by Illinois’s unfair move to defraud lottery players.
One group of city employees in Chicago joined a lottery pool and won! But because their state doesn’t want to pay, those hard working employees have not seen one cent of their $1 million winnings.
A hospital clerk, Rhonda Rasche, turned to the lottery to make ends meet. When she finally won big, getting $50,000 from a scratch ticket, she went to the lottery office to cash it in. That’s when officials broke the news to her. They didn’t have the money. She would get a check in the mail in four to six weeks with her winnings.
While that was all well and good, that was months ago. Rhonda Rasche has not yet been paid.
Because Rasche is not the only one left unpaid by Illinois, she and a group of other lottery winners have joined forces to sue the state to get their winnings. They hired Zimmerman to represent them.
“If any private business would engage in this kind of conduct selling tickets and not paying out the winner, the state would shut them down and indict them for fraud,” Zimmerman said.
Watch the report from Inside Edition below to see and hear from the Illinois lottery winners who have yet to be paid.
Viewers of the popular segment left comments including:
“Ok, now I am moving out of Illinois”
“I don’t feel sorry about the Illinois Lottery: It’s not their fault it is this country’s fault. This nation will NEVER HAVE a good and healthy economy as long as the Federal Reserve is in business. Do you realize or even understand that they print money out from NOTHING??”
“WE WANT OUR MONEY”
“THEY WANT THEIR MONEY GIVE THEM THEIR MONEY”
What would you do if your state refused to pay your lottery winnings?
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