Lottery Error Will Cost South Carolina $100,000

(CANVAS STAFF REPORTS) - South Carolina's lottery office said it would pay nearly $100,000 for numbers that didn't win. The slip-up happened during Saturday night's Pick 4 drawing, according to the The Rock Hill Herald .

During the drawing, the number 7245 was chosen. But somehow 1245 wound up in the central system for validating claims.

Individual tickets could be worth anywhere from $100 to $5,000, depending on the combination of numbers.

The total payout for the real winning numbers is $20,000; the wrong numbers will set the lottery back $98,100.

The South Carolina Education Lottery office was investigating. Lottery spokeswoman Stephanie Summers Hemminghaus said a similar error happened in June 2005.

The Virginia lottery paid for a mistake in 2008 after terminals issued tickets with winnings of as much as $7,777. Officials also awarded partial prizes for the defective scratch-off tickets. The mistake was ultimately blamed on human error.

In April 2008, the same three winning number were drawn three days straight in Tennessee . That was the second time in two months the same numbers repeated on consecutive days. At the time, lottery officials said the repeating numbers were a coincidence and stressed that the computers had been checked.

Unfortunately for Tennessee, computers have played a part in some lottery goofs. In March 2008, a software problem generated winning numbers without digits that repeated, meaning a number such as 999 had no chance of winning.

According to Wikipedia, more than 40 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands have some form of lottery .