Gratta e Vinci: the State promises the million-euro prize to everyone. The loss is that someone won it

26 October 2026, 18:19

Five former employees of Lottomatica, one of the companies that run Gratta e Vinci, Italy's scratch-card lottery, on behalf of the State, knew which tobacconist's shop the winning tickets would be sent to. According to the charges, they could see it from their office computers, with their own passwords and a program made for the purpose, and they sent relatives and friends there to buy them. Four tickets, between 2015 and 2019, in Milan, in the province of Brescia, in Foggia and in Cremona: €24 million in prizes. On 23 October Milano Finanza reported that the Court of Auditors, the court that checks how public money is used, is asking the five to give the State back more than €25 million, and that the Guardia di Finanza has frozen their houses, cars and accounts. No one, so far, has been convicted.

Lottomatica's rules barred employees from playing. According to the charges, the friends played instead.

Why would that money belong to the State? Because prizes nobody claims stay with the State, and according to the charges, without the trick, nobody would have claimed those prizes. The State promises the million-euro prize to everyone. For the State, the loss is that someone won it.

In 2017, while according to the charges the trick was going on, the State left Gratta e Vinci with the same companies for another nine years, without asking anyone else whether they would pay more. Il Fatto Quotidiano summed up the reason that summer: "to have the State collect €800 million as quickly as possible". To collect, the State was in a hurry. To notice the trick, it took five years: the first seizures date from 2020. To ask for the money back, eleven.

Meanwhile Italians keep scratching. In 2025 they spent more than €12.6 billion on Gratta e Vinci, over €200 a head, and about €1.8 billion of it went to the State. Millions of people pay for the same chance of winning.

Now the government is looking for money for 2027 in gambling too, and the newspapers write that the idea is to hold the new Gratta e Vinci tender before 2028. Whoever wins it pays the State to run the game, so holding it earlier means collecting earlier. In 2017 the tender was skipped to get the money straight away. Now the plan is to bring it forward to get the money sooner. Everything about the tender changes, except the hurry.

So the question, for the Customs and Monopolies Agency, the State office that oversees gambling: will the rules of the new tender say who can see where a million-euro ticket is going, and who checks the people looking?

Gratta e Vinci sells everyone the same luck. Four times, according to the charges, someone already knew where to go and pick it up.

This article was prompted by a news item published in Milano Finanza on 23 October 2026.