Three years ago, the Broward County man, the Lottery’s most prolific winner, called up state officials to confess his role in a wide-ranging lottery fraud scheme.
Lottery employees took Johnson’s confession but, after a halfhearted attempt at an investigation, quickly shelved it. Despite considerable evidence of fraud, Johnson kept participating in illegal ticket-cashing at stores near his Pompano Beach home.
Only when evidence of the scheme was revealed earlier this year, in an investigation by The Post’s Lawrence Mower, did Lottery officials finally get serious.
Now, belatedly, Lottery officials have swept into convenience stores whose owners were accused of being in cahoots with Johnson, seizing their lottery ticket machines.
As The Post’s investigation showed, this sort of fraud appears prevalent in several places around the state, including in Palm Beach County, where a Lantana woman who “won” the lottery 99 times claims that she is simply lucky.
But more than two months after The Post’s revelations, Lottery officials still have been slow to clamp down. They have announced some new measures to prevent fraud, such as new software to detect suspicious patterns. T
hey have removed lottery machines from some suspect stores. But still there have been no arrests. Until recently, Johnson had continued to cash in tickets.
Should Florida do more to prevent lottery fraud? What do you think?