Crimes Of Convenience: Proximity To Winning Tickets Is Just Too Much Temptation For Some Clerks

Last July, a store clerk at a Tennessee gas station sold a customer two scratch-off tickets. They both were winners — one paid $40, the other $1 million. The clerk, Meer Patel, paid the customer his $40 and threw the other ticket in the trash. 

After the customer left, Patel allegedly (and according to the video that captured him doing it) fished the million-dollar winner out of the garbage and tried to collect the jackpot from the Tennessee Lottery. Officials became suspicious and busted him.

For almost as long as lotteries have existed, some of the folks involved in selling their promise have been trying to get in on the action — not by buying tickets themselves, necessarily, but by stealing winning tickets, stealing unsold tickets in search of a winner, under-paying customers for winning tickets and pocketing the difference, reselling known losers and cashing in winners, and probably a dozen other ways no one has caught onto yet.

Low pay, high incentive 

Convenience store clerks in the U.S. make an average of about $17 an hour, or $35,000 a year. That’s far above the minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, but you’re not living the high life handing out scratch-offs and packs of Marlboro Reds all day. And let’s face it: Dealing with the public all day is not for the faint-hearted.  

Meanwhile, virtually every lottery ticket a clerk sells, every scratch-off, has the potential to make one of their customers filthy rich, or at the least, richer than they were when they walked into the store. 

Plus, the store owner, who is far more likely than the employees to have money to burn, gets a fat commission whenever a big winner is sold at his store, and in fact gets paid for every ticket sold.

Moreover, crimes against convenience store clerks are so common — partly, one imagines, because of their proximity to lottery tickets — that it’s a running gag on The Simpsons. It’s not that much of a stretch.

In September 2024, a San Antonio, Texas man entered a convenience store, punched the clerk in the face, and stole a handful of lottery tickets.  

Another robbery turned tragic in January 2022 when several thieves entered a dollar store in Warner Robins, Georgia, and shot and killed the store clerk, Sabrina Renee Dollar. (Yes. A woman whose last name was “Dollar” worked at the dollar store.) 

After the robbers left, a customer in the store, a registered nurse named Lakiesha Deshawn McGhee, administered first aid to the victim, called 9-1-1, tried to disable the store’s surveillance system, and then allegedly stole a pile of lottery tickets from the back office.

This is how crazy lottery tickets make people. Who wants to deal with that?

We’re not condoning the myriad criminal and unethical ways in which convenience store clerks try to get in on all the money around them, just inches from their grasp, but it’s hard to not, on some level, understand.

It happens all the time

Whether or not you empathize with them, clerks trying to cash in on lotteries they don’t play is remarkably common. 

In February 2024, a 24-year-old convenience store clerk in Boston named Carly Nunes pleaded guilty to charges that she and an accomplice grabbed a winning lottery ticket that a customer had forgotten to take with him when he left the store and took it to the commission, claiming she had bought it. 

The ticket was worth $3 million. She and the accomplice were arrested, and the man who bought the ticket eventually received his winnings.

In January 2018, Rayhan Sorwar, a clerk in Edison, New Jersey, was handed a ticket worth $1 million at an unnamed store in Middlesex County. Instead of handing the lucky customer a claim form, he allegedly told her she’d won two free lottery tickets, handed them to her, and sent her on her way.

Sorwar then called his wife, had her retrieve the ticket and claim form, and sent her to lottery headquarters to collect the jackpot. He was charged with theft and money laundering.

The patron saint of all convenience store lottery-ticket swindlers may be Pankaj Joshi, who, in October 2009, told customer Willy Willis that the ticket he’d bought in a North Texas Lucky Food Store was worth $2. In reality, Willis’ ticket was worth a cool $1 million.

A month later Joshi showed up at the lottery headquarters in Austin and claimed the prize. The commission wired $750,000 into his bank account, and Joshi disappeared. The authorities presumed he fled to Nepal, his native country. 

They were correct, and Joshi evaded authorities for 25 years until he was arrested in Nepal and charged with money laundering in connection with the lottery scheme. He was fined 20.6 million Nepalese rupees (about $235,000).

Small-time crooks      

It’s not always the big jackpots clerks try to steal. When Crystelle Baton, a Winn-Dixie Liquors clerk working in Fort Myers, Florida scanned a customer’s ticket in January 2018, it came up a $600 winner. 

Instead of handing over $600, she allegedly took $5 from her purse and told the customer that was what he’d won. Unfortunately for Baton, the “customer” was an undercover agent from its security division conducting a random visit. Baton was arrested.

A similar incident took place in Baltimore in 2011, when a lottery official conducting routine compliance checks brought a $10,000 ticket into a liquor store owned by Melissa Stone, who was working the counter. 

According to police, Stone told the “customer” the ticket was a loser, then attempted to cash it in at the lottery headquarters. She was charged with grand theft.

Of course, it’s not like you need a customer to steal from. A Gas World clerk in Augusta, Georgia was charged with grand larceny after police said that he played, but never paid for, at least $1,200 worth of scratch-off lottery and Quick Pick tickets in December 2024. The owner notified police when he noticed the cash drawer kept coming up short. 

In August 2015, Linda Porter, a clerk at a Tobacco Alley cigarette store in Meyersdale, Pennsylvania, was charged with stealing $50,000 worth of scratch-off tickets between December and July. The store owner gave police hours of video that showed Porter scratching tickets.  

Some scams require more work than others. 

A liquor store clerk in Santa Ana, California named Francis Bou Karam was arrested in 2014 and charged with grand theft and forgery after lottery officials became suspicious over the number of winners sold at the store.  

An investigation revealed that Karam had been redeeming winning lottery tickets and re-selling losing tickets to customers in a scam called “pinning,” which involves scratching just enough material off a ticket to see whether it is a loser or winner.  

Police said Karam redeemed $50,000 in winning lottery tickets. Between the tickets that were resold and those Karam cashed in, lottery officials said they’ll never know how many customers were cheated out of winnings.

For his trouble, Karam was sentenced to six months in jail, ordered to pay $150,000 in restitution to the state and a $10,000 fine, and is barred from working at a lottery retailer.

The last of these punishments would seem the most difficult to enforce. There are roughly 120,000 convenience stores in the U.S. that sell lottery tickets. It can’t be that hard for an enterprising man like Karam to find just the right one.