This Florida couple allegedly tried to fake it big.
Kira Enders and her boyfriend Dakota Jones allegedly attempted to trick lottery officials into giving them a $1 million prize with two torn scratch-off tickets spliced together to form a winning ticket, according to authorities.
The two tickets were ripped horizontally with the top half of one ticket and the bottom half of the other then “carefully pieced together” to show the $1 million prize winner, according to a police report cited by the Pensacola News Journal.
But the Frankenstein ticket was not fooling anyone as the failed fraudster forgot to check the serial numbers of the two different scratch-offs, law enforcement said.
“I don’t think this is gonna be a made-for-TV movie type of situation because, uh, it was clear to the lottery officials — and obviously clear to us — that she had taken two tickets with different, you know, one side had one serial number, the other side had the other serial number on it,” Escambia County Sheriff Chip Simmons said, according to CBS Florida.
“Especially whenever you pretend like you’ve won a million dollars, they’re gonna take a look at this at this ticket.”
Several days after Enders, 36, submitted the ticket to the Florida Lottery in March, she and Jones, 32, drove to meet with a lottery agent to follow up about the possible winnings.
Instead of being handed a big check, the pair was quickly taken into custody and questioned separately once they arrived.
Enders allegedly claimed the ticket fell out of her car and it then got rained on, the police report states. She then told authorities she tried to scratch it before it was dry and was forced to tape it together to keep it from getting further ruined.
After she was confronted about the mismatching backsides of the two halves, she allegedly said, “What, they don’t go together” and then argued the ticket wasn’t taped the right way, according to the police documents obtained by the Pensacola News Journal.
She said she would have shared the winnings with Jones and hoped to open a salon, per the report, according to Fox 35.
Meanwhile, Jones told the same lottery agent the couple found two halves of a wet ticket walking down a road in DeFuniak Springs, the police report states.
“Jones stated that once scratched, the ticket said a million dollars and he was like, ‘No freaking way,'” the report states, according to the newspaper. “Jones advised that they did not buy the ticket and he doesn’t know what Enders told us but that’s the truth.”
Then the agent informed him that he told Enders the numbers on the top and bottom were different, which led Jones to reportedly reply that his gal pal knew they didn’t match.
“I began to state, ‘So she obviously knew …’ and Jones stated, ‘Yeah, she knew, man,'” the agent alleged in the report. “Jones quickly changed what he was saying and stated that when they looked at the ticket, they thought it was legit.”
The two were arrested this month and charged with forgery/alteration of a lottery ticket with intent to defraud, passing a forged/altered state lottery ticket and larceny—grand theft of $100,000 or more, Fox 35 reported.
