Montana Lottery Warns About Secondary Market Tickets

The Montana Millionaire tickets sold out this year in record time. A lot of people were caught off guard by how quickly they sold out, including the lottery employees. The Montana Lottery added another 100,000 tickets this year along with another $1,000,000 jackpot. That makes 3, $1,000,000 jackpots this year and a total of 380,000 tickets sold.

Montana Millionaire Tickets Sold Out In Less Than 5 Hours

Last year the tickets sold out in 29 hours. This year it was almost exactly 5 hours. The tickets went on sale at 5:30am and by 10:26am they were all sold out. I spoke with Daniel Iverson from the Montana Lottery. He told me the last ticket was purchased at a retailer in East Helena.

The volume of tickets being sold was incredible. One outlet in Great Falls reportedly sold 2500 tickets at that one location. Some people who bought multiple tickets thought that there may have been something wrong because the numbers between the two tickets were so high. That was due to the huge volume of the tickets being sold. If you do the math, they averaged selling over 1,283 tickets per minute. The Montana Lottery website, that kept a running total of the tickets sold, was so busy it crashed for about 30 minutes.

Will The Montana Lottery Expand The Game Even More?

With the amount of demand for tickets this year, I asked Dan if there was any plan to possibly add in a second drawing during the year. Here is what he said regarding expanding the game:

Yeah, that's a possibility we've looked at and a popular suggestion among our players. It's something that we're considering along with further increases to the number of tickets, and the number of prizes. We're really trying to look at it from every angle and a little bit outside of the box as well. We are starting those conversations.

Montana Lottery's Warning About Secondary Market Tickets

With the amount of demand that the game has shown this year, there has been another consequence of the game. Some people on Social Media sites have been offering up tickets for sale or have been asking if someone is willing to sell one of their tickets. Daniel addressed this issue with a warning:

It's certainly one of those unintended consequences that comes from the demand, but we've seen a couple posts on Facebook, a couple on Craigslist where people are attempting to sell the tickets second hand. We recommend against buying those. That's it's hard to say what the legitimacy of the tickets is, and we'd hate to see people pay more than face value for them... We're taking a look at it because it does appear from our understanding of the law that it is illegal to do that, unless you are a licensed lottery sales agent. 

I applaud all of the retail workers who got up early on a Wednesday morning in November to deal with the crowds of anxious players with dreams of becoming a "Montana Millionaire". Good luck to all who were lucky enough to get a ticket this year. May the odds be forever in your favor. Please play responsibly.