After the State of Illinois failed to pay out their winning lottery tickets, families and residents were outraged and demanded justice. The winners sought legal help to fight against the State and get their winnings.
Attorney Tom Zimmerman, is now representing some of the winners and claims that Illinois has failed to pay out $288 million in lottery prizes.
Why is the State not paying? Illinois blamed their failure to pay on their ‘budget crisis’. If anyone won more than $600 from a lottery ticket, the State refused to pay it. Television ads continue to run and promote the lottery to millions of residents.
Residents are being punished for the State’s budget crisis, even though the State continues to sell lottery tickets.
Susan Rick, a lottery winner, said that the State has kept thousands of dollars of her winnings.
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, a group of city employees in Chicago joined a lottery pool and won! Because their State doesn’t want to pay, those hard working employees have not seen one cent of their $1 million winnings.
Hospital clerk, Rhonda Rasche, 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 right then and there, but she would get a check in the mail in four to six weeks with her winnings. That was months ago and 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.
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