Store owner claiming $21.5M jackpot misled officials: documents
An Ontario store owner who claimed a $21.5-million prize in 2006 misled lottery officials when he first spoke to them about the winning ticket, according to documents recently obtained by CBC News after a lengthy dispute with the province's lottery corporation.
Eun Chul Shin, who owned a convenience store in Cambridge, Ont., initially told the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. that the ticket belonged to a customer who had left his store, according to a file that was made public after the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario ordered OLG to release it to the CBC program The Fifth Estate.
The internal documents also reveal that Shin won four other lottery prizes in the same year — one of them a $10,000 instant win prize just four days before he showed up at the corporation's prize office to claim a $21.5-million Lotto 6/49 jackpot. Shin's other three wins, with Pro-Line sports betting lottery, totalled roughly $4,600.
When asked later why he had initially misled lottery officials, the documents show, Shin said "he panicked and thought there would be unwanted media attention if he told the OLG that he was the owner of this Lotto 6/49 ticket."
Some details of the case first became public in September 2006, when Shin's former common-law partner sued him. Young Hee Cho alleged that Shin left her just after the jackpot draw in July 2006 and was trying to cheat her out of her portion of the winnings she claims she is entitled to because she was his common-law spouse. Cho told investigators that as a couple, they spent about $100 each week buying lottery tickets.
The money is being held in trust pending the outcome of the lawsuit.
In recent months, the OLG has toughened its lottery-ticket validation processes after a series of so-called "insider wins" — cases in which convenience store owners and clerks win prizes in the lotteries for which they are selling and checking tickets.
Privacy commissioner orders file released
Despite the public attention created by the Cho lawsuit, the OLG tried to keep the Shin file hidden from the public domain.
For almost two years, the OLG fought The Fifth Estate's request for access to the file, leading its investigative journalists to appeal to Ontario's privacy commissioner.
They argued that releasing the information was in the public interest, citing a 2006 expose that revealed clerks and owners were winning a disproportionate amount of lottery winnings, and in some cases defrauding customers who had bought winning tickets.
They would then present the lucky tickets as their own and claim the prizes.
In a ruling in April, Ontario's Assistant Privacy Commissioner Brian Beamish ordered the OLG to make "insider win" information public.
He agreed with CBC that "the public interest is served by bringing greater scrutiny to the process."