While Mike Platzer can’t compete with the Oregon Lottery’s biggest jackpot winners, in one sense, he seems the luckiest of them all.
In July 2021, Platzer claimed $2 million on a Powerball ticket purchased at The Pit Stop Sports Bar & BBQ Grill in Beaverton. A year and a half later, he collected on another $1 million Powerball winner. Then again last October, with a $1 million winner on Mega Millions.
In the meantime, he was scoring like clockwork with smaller, but still noteworthy Oregon Lottery claims: $51,000 here, $76,000 there, cashing in batches of winning tickets at a time.
All told, since 2019, Platzer has made 104 winning claims for Powerball and Mega Millions totaling $4.8 million – with all but one of those wins at The Pit Stop, according to the Oregon Lottery and an analysis of its data by The Oregonian/OregonLive.
Does this guy have a system, or what?
In fact, he does. He’s playing Powerball and Mega Millions through the Oregon Lottery on an industrial scale, effectively purchasing millions of tickets annually on behalf of customers in Australia and New Zealand. He doesn’t personally take home the prize, but his employer apparently comes out a winner.
Platzer works for The Lottery Office, a firm based in Australia’s Northern Territories town of Darwin. The company offers Aussies and Kiwis the chance to play some of the largest lotteries in the United States and around the world through an elaborate structure that requires operating mirror lotteries Down Under.
The overseas purchases don’t change the odds of anyone here winning. It’s still about 1 in 300 million for both the Powerball or Mega Millions jackpot, though the bulk sales may slightly increase the chance of someone having to split a jackpot.
But lottery officials in New York, New Jersey and Washington told The Oregonian/OregonLive that international purchases of tickets through third party services are not allowed in their lottery drawings. Mega Millions has specifically banned the practice, and sent a warning letter to Oregon after an official in Quebec complained about the sale of those tickets to customers in Canada.
Oregon appears to be a hub for sales linked to at least two international companies. That’s because the state has a track record of paying out winnings to people from other countries. It also has a history of making bulk electronic ticket sales easier. And the state offers a high commission to retailers on ticket sales, making it an attractive place for international companies to buy and potentially receive a slice of high-volume ticket sales by negotiating a cut of those proceeds from retailers.
Lottery rules, including in Oregon, typically require a ticket buyer to be physically located in-state when they make a purchase. A cottage industry of buyers – or so-called courier services such as Lotto.com, Jackpocket, theLotter – has sprung up to make purchasing more convenient for domestic buyers through online apps and, in some cases, to buy tickets for international buyers. The couriers’ applications use geo location technology for domestic customers to make sure they’re physically present in-state when an order is placed, although those restrictions don’t apply to international sales of certain games.
While its service appears little different, The Lottery Office told The Oregonian/OregonLive that it is not a lottery courier and has a different business model.
The Lottery Office sells tickets not to American lotteries but instead to its “proprietary” lotteries in Australia, in these cases called the USA Power Lotto and USA Mega Lotto. The company then purchases matching tickets in the Powerball and Mega Millions lotteries at The Pit Stop, effectively insuring the ticket.
The Lottery Office makes money because players pay a service fee to the company to buy the tickets. When a ticket wins in the United States’ lotteries, The Lottery Office collects here, then pays winnings “identical to the amount that we won” to whomever purchased the matching ticket in its own lotteries, which use identical numbers as Mega Millions and Powerball.
The Lottery Office declined to say where beyond Oregon it is buying tickets, and it’s not clear how many other states would allow it. The company said its business in Oregon is good for the state.
“The purchase of the matching tickets by The Lottery Office contributes to the relevant lotteries’ prize pools and to state lottery revenue, which benefits residents in the states where we purchase and hold the tickets,” the company said in an emailed statement.
Matt Shelby, a spokesperson for the Oregon Lottery, said international sales of tickets through such services is a gray area. He said the agency believes it’s operating within the rules, but is open to guidance from the Legislature, voters or the multi-state consortia that operate Mega Millions and Powerball.
If told to stop such sales, the Oregon Lottery would, he said.
“There’s nothing in statute saying not to do it,” he said in an interview. “There’s also nothing specifically enabling it. We would welcome additional guidance in this area.”
While video lottery games are by far king in Oregon, accounting for about 93% of overall sales in 2023, other, more profitable games collectively brought in about $1.1 billion in revenues. Of that, about $148 million came from just the two national lotteries, Powerball and Mega Millions. And more than a quarter of those sales were tied to just four retailers in the Portland area, all of whom provide dedicated services for high-volume sales.
The Pit Stop is the biggest of them all. Last year, it accounted for $20 million, or 14%, of the state’s Powerball and Mega Millions sales, generating commissions of $1.6 million in the process for the bar’s owner, Dani Rosendahl. Retailers separately earn a bonus of 1% of the prize amount on winning tickets of $10,000 or more, capped at a $100,000 payout to the retailer.
Shelby said it’s safe to assume she’s the top retailer of those tickets because of her relationship with the Australian business. And Platzer doesn’t even need to come to Oregon, lottery officials said, because he has granted power of attorney to Rosendahl.
“She’s the one who shows up at Lottery headquarters to claim the winning tickets,” Shelby said.
Contacted by The Oregonian/OregonLive, Rosendahl said she couldn’t remember how many big winners had been sold at her bar.
When a reporter mentioned Platzer, she declined to comment and hung up.
Rosendahl subsequently said in an email that there has never been a back-end split of commissions with The Lottery Office and reiterated that her arrangement with the company is not a courier service. But she declined to answer several other written questions.
Paving way for sales
The Oregon Lottery embraced courier services early on as a means to increase sales.
The issue came to a head in 2015, when an Iraqi man presented the winning ticket for a $6.4 million Oregon Megabucks jackpot that he purchased through an online service.
Oregon paid the prize. He had to come to America to claim it, and Oregon Lottery officials took the unusual step of not publicly naming him, saying it could put him at risk when he returned home.
That decision to pay, and the comfort it gave courier services that Oregon would make good on such a win, was a factor in those services funneling international sales though Oregon, said Darian Stanford, a Portland lawyer who works with theLotter.
A year later, the Lottery Commission changed an administrative rule to allow pay slips, which are fed into a machine to generate tickets, to be printed digitally instead of filled out by hand.
“That change did make high volume sales much easier,” Shelby, the lottery spokesperson, acknowledged.
Meeting minutes from the Lottery Commission at the time don’t say who lobbied for the change, but when approving a temporary rule, then-Lottery Director Jack Roberts called the existing rules “archaic and inefficient” and said they were hindering the lottery’s mission to maximize revenue. Even waiting for a permanent rule change, he said, would result in the loss of two months of higher sales, reducing needed state revenue at a time when the Mega Millions jackpot was getting big, and sales were booming.
While Oregon has welcomed couriers with open arms, some states, like Washington, don’t allow courier sales at all. Kristi Weeks, director of legal services for the Washington Lottery, said the agency isn’t ethically or morally opposed to couriers, they just don’t fly under the state’s gaming laws.
Weeks questioned how international residents could purchase tickets in other states.
“It’s my understanding that sales outside the United States of Powerball or Mega Millions is a violation of game rules,” she said.
Powerball is administered by the Multistate Lottery Association, and Mega Millions by a consortium of its 12 original lotteries. Neither responded to requests for comment for this story.
Other state lotteries that regulate couriers, including New York and New Jersey, also told The Oregonian/OregonLive that sales of Powerball and Mega Millions tickets to international customers who aren’t physically located in those states when they make the purchase are not permitted.
“Every ticket that is purchased by a courier service must be linked to a NJ courier customer prior to each applicable drawing,” the New Jersey State Lottery said in an emailed response to questions.
That state goes even further. It requires courier services to submit daily reports for each game they sell, showing every ticket purchased, for which customer, and the location of the customer at the time of purchase.
International sales did become an issue in Oregon in 2018, when the director of the lottery in Quebec complained to the Mega Millions consortium about the theLotter’s sale of Mega Millions tickets through the Oregon Lottery to customers in Canada. The nature of the complaint isn’t clear, but Canadian officials likely wanted to maintain a monopoly on lottery revenue, discouraging residents from playing abroad.
In response, the consortium passed a new rule prohibiting state lottery directors from knowingly permitting the sale, resale or transfer of tickets outside their jurisdiction. It then sent a letter to Barry Pack, Oregon’s lottery director at the time, telling him to ensure Oregon retailers discontinued such sales and warning that the state could lose its sales privileges without compliance.
He reluctantly did so, and theLotter, based in Malta, stopped selling Mega Millions to international customers.
One other perk that may help explain why Oregon is a draw for international companies: Oregon pays an 8% commission to retailers on lottery sales, more than many other states.
California vendors, for instance, make between 4.5% and 6% on ticket sales, while Florida and Texas sellers get 5%. Oregon’s higher rate may facilitate a back-end split between the retailer and the courier on the large volume of sales they generate.
The Oregon Lottery doesn’t regulate that, either.
Melanie Mesaros, a spokesperson for the lottery, said any financial split of commissions or other monetary arrangements would be between the parties.
Inside Oregon’s lottery factories
The Pit Stop isn’t much to look at from the outside: It’s a low slung, brown building amid the suburban strip malls and car dealerships off Southwest Canyon Road. Inside is a standard sports bar: dark, TVs everywhere, video poker, and a digital display above the bar running a constant feed of betting odds on various sporting events.
It’s a comfortable spot full of locals enjoying a drink, playing bingo in an adjoining room or tucking into pub fare. On a recent Wednesday evening, there was no sign of industrial scale lottery purchases, and the owner, Rosenthal, has declined to comment on where all the tickets designated for Australia are being printed.
During the week before the $1.3 billion Powerball jackpot on April 6, The Pit Stop sold $724,308 worth of Powerball tickets alone – with the winning ticket ultimately purchased at a Plaid Pantry in Portland’s Cully neighborhood.
The volume of ticket sales at The Pit Stop is staggering. Based on a ticket price between $2 and $3, that’s the equivalent of printing between 1,437 to 2,155 tickets an hour, 24 hours a day.
The Oregon Lottery says The Pit Stop has three lottery terminals. During a visit to the business, a reporter saw only one visible, behind the bar.
Oregon’s other three top retailers for Mega Millions and Powerball work in partnership with couriers or lottery agents, and generate millions in sales each year. They include two other Portland bars – Produce Row and The Independent Sports Bar & Grill – owned by the same restaurant group, as well as Winners Corner, a gaming shop in Northeast Portland.
Out of 4,000 retail locations statewide, those four businesses accounted for 26% of Powerball and Mega Millions sales. The next biggest retailer is a Milwaukie 7-Eleven that sold only $183,400 in 2023, or about a tenth of a percent of the state total.
No surprise, peak activity for courier services comes when jackpots get really big, said Stanford, the Portland lawyer who works with theLotter, which purchases its tickets through Produce Row and the Independent Sports Bar & Grill.
“There’s a saying in the business that no one gets out of bed for less than $500 million,” he said. Above that is when sales start to grow exponentially.
Stanford said Produce Row has lottery terminals dedicated to high-volume customers in a separate annex of the building. The process is much the same as going to a convenience store, but in this case it is a group of employees from the bar and the courier service sitting in a room, watching TV, listening to music and printing lottery tickets and other needed paperwork en masse.
Stanford said the company employs 10 people in Portland, though hours depend on ticket volume.
Orders come in electronically, and the couriers’ staff either print out a slip they can feed into a terminal if a customer has selected individual numbers, or simply choose random numbers through a quick-pick option.
With the physical ticket in hand, they scan it to forward a copy to the corresponding customer, then sort tickets for storage and, later, retrieval.
Every courier service has a slightly different business model and process, but the work is largely the same.
Said Stanford, who personally filled orders before a big jackpot drawing a few years ago: “It’s a very labor-intensive process.”
From his standpoint, it’s absurd that someone from Toronto can drive to Detroit to buy a Mega Millions ticket, then legitimately claim the prize, but they can’t do it on their phones. “Does that make sense? It’s 2024.”
“I haven’t heard a good answer to what is the harm they were seeking to solve,” added Stanford, who said he doesn’t have a financial stake in theLotter. “The sky wouldn’t fall if someone from Brazil won a big jackpot. We have a game that people want to play.”
While international sales of Mega Millions are no longer allowed, Powerball sales continue through theLotter. And the Oregon Lottery said the Multi-State Lottery Association, which controls Powerball, has never raised any objections.
And as for The Pit Stop’s unique relationship with The Lottery Office and the purchasing of millions of lottery tickets through the Oregon Lottery: Neither the Australian government nor Mega Millions nor Powerball has objected, the agency said.
“We don’t believe there is a violation,” said Mesaros, the Oregon Lottery spokesperson.
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