A court has ordered Italy’s National Lottery operator to reimburse a scratch card player who failed to win a prize in a year’s worth of play.
On Monday, Italian media outlet Il Messaggero reported that a local court in Vallo della Lucania, a small town in the province of Salerno, had ordered National Lottery operator Lottomatica to pay approximately €3k to a 29-year-old man who claims to have spent that sum buying 255 scratch and win cards over the past year without winning anything.
The judge who heard the man’s tale of woe declared that the scratch tickets displayed no information regarding the probability of winning a prize nor any warning about the potentially addictive properties of lottery tickets.
Italian court rulings have established that lottery scratchcards must include such warning messages, or, if the card is too small to adequately display these messages, it must direct players to a website containing the full message.
Studio Cataldi reported that, while the majority of lottery tickets are now compliant with these obligations, some non-compliant tickets remain in circulation. The tickets in the Salerno case were reportedly non-compliant, leading the judge to rule that the implicit contract between the man and Lottomatica was null and void.
Paolo Siniscalco, the attorney who represented the (originally) unlucky lottery player, told Adnkronos that he had brought 40 cases like this to local courts in recent years, and every verdict that has come down so far has been in his favor. Siniscalco said he was now expanding his scope to courts in Rome and Bologna.
