A bill moving through the Texas Legislature could ban the use of smartphones and apps to order lottery tickets.
Texas Senate Bill 1820, authored by Sen. Bob Hall, has passed the Senate. The bill is now in a House committee, according to Sen. Hall.
“It makes it real clear that use of any aspect of it, if there’s internet, computers involved in it cannot be done,” Hall told NBC 5 Thursday. “It’s the issue itself being outside the bounds of what the Legislature really intended in allowing the lottery to take place and not be done such that it opens it up to encouraging an addict to easily spend family fortune.”
Under Texas law, all purchases of Texas Lottery tickets are required to be conducted at licensed brick-and-mortar retailer locations. Lottery courier services, which are third-party companies that purchase tickets on behalf of Texas Lottery players and deliver them digitally to players via third-party apps, added a new dynamic to a recent Lotto Texas jackpot run.
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The Texas Lottery Commission said after seven months and 93 drawings without a jackpot winner, a winning Lotto Texas ticket was sold in Colleyville last Saturday.
The interest in this particular jackpot made the recent Lotto Texas run unique, according to executive director Gary Grief.
“It created a phenomenon. It’s something that I have seen occur around the country and other parts of the world over time, but we have never experienced it before here in Texas,” Grief said. “What that phenomenon was, was purchasing groups came to Texas and they saw that the odds of winning the jackpot was 1 in 25 million. They saw that the jackpot was $95 million and they started buying tickets in bulk.”
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The winning ticket went to one of those bulk purchases bought at Hooked on MT, a store on Colleyville Boulevard. Kevin Kramer is the operator of Hooked on MT, which serves both retail customers and helps fulfill orders placed with their courier app, Mido Lotto.
The winning ticket purchased last Saturday was not purchased on the app, Kramer told NBC 5. The company strongly opposes any moves to prohibit the courier model, it said in a statement.
“Customer data clearly shows that couriers are making Lottery more accessible and less regressive by serving higher income consumers who don’t carry cash these days and often don’t go into traditional Lottery retailers. Couriers have helped the Texas Lottery give more funding to their beneficiaries which include education and veterans, sourced from a more affluent customer base, who are often not already heavy Lottery players, given the inconvenience of taking cash to a corner store in the modern day. It also helps consumers who are unable to leave their home for health or other reasons to order Lottery tickets safely,” a statement to NBC 5 read.
Asked whether the Texas Lottery Commission has a stance on couriers, Grief said they do not have a position.
“We know they exist. We have made it known that they exist,” he said. “In fact, they have been in Texas since about 2016, but just recently, there seems to be a large amount of interest.”
The Texas Lottery Commission added, sales for this Lotto Texas jackpot run were $138.2 million in total. That yielded an estimated $50.6 million for public education over this period of time.
