A Florida couple's gamble on a counterfeit lottery win has landed them in hot water with the law. Kira Enders, 36, and her boyfriend Dakota Jones, of Walton County, have been slapped with felony charges after attempting to pass off a doctored $50 scratch-off ticket as a million-dollar jackpot, officials said.
The pair's crude attempt to deceive was quickly spotted by Florida Lottery officials when Enders turned in the bogus ticket at a Pensacola office on March 1. The ticket, described by the Escambia Co. Sheriff's Office as two separate scratch-offs inelegantly cobbled together, was immediately recognized as a fraud, despite having to have one side donned with one serial number and the other with another, as reported by CBS Miami.
"They had an individual that thought that they could, they could crudely take two tickets and put them together and pretend as if they were a million dollar winner," Escambia Sheriff Chip Simmons recounted, conveying the stark futility of the ruse to authorities.
Enders, clinging to her story, called the lottery office less than a week later, still in pursuit of the illusive prize. Instead, investigators invited her and Jones for a personal meeting where their divergent tales about how they came into possession of the ticket and its subsequent tinkering became evident. Visible inconsistencies on the back of the tickets and their mismatching stories eventually spelled out the couple's undoing, according to details mentioned in KFOX14 on X.
A Florida couple has been arrested for allegedly altering a scratch-off ticket into a $1 million winner and submitting it to the Florida Lottery Office in Pensacola. https://t.co/3BotQ4076E
— KFOX14 News (@KFOX14) April 19, 2024
In the face of irrefutable evidence and after signing an affidavit affirming the ticket's authenticity, Enders repeatedly insisted the ticket was legitimate, claiming it had simply been taped back together after an accidental tear. But the sheriff was unmoved by the farce. "If you're gonna try to claim a million dollars, you've got to do a lot better than this. You know, you're not a lottery winner, you're a criminal," he expressed in a statement to CBS Miami, summarizing the ill-conceived scheme that has now seen both Enders and Jones facing potential felony consequences.
