Employee accused of stealing $82,000 in lottery tickets from Westmoreland County gas station
Last Thursday, at the BP gas station along Wendel Road in Hempfield Township, a 52-year-old female employee was arrested by the Pennsylvania State Police for stealing what could be up to $82,000 in lottery tickets since December of last year.
State police have not released the suspect's name. However, Steve Limani, the public information officer with the Greensburg barracks, said this is an ongoing investigation and authorities are looking to see what this woman's motivation was and if she had an accomplice.
"The warning would be, if you are an employee at a store, however temping it may be to try and reach in and take a ticket, don't do it unless you are paying for it," Limani said.
On Monday afternoon, KDKA stopped by another local lottery retailer, the Greensburg Newsstand on West Otterman Street near the Westmoreland Courthouse. KDKA spoke with owner Allan Lydic about how someone might steal lottery tickets.
In short, he said it would be very difficult. Lydic says there are so many checks on tickets, from both the daily accounting done in a store and by the lottery itself, that a theft like the one in Hempfield couldn't possibly have gone undetected for long.
"If you were to daily take a $5 ticket and not account for it, if you are not doing your accounting daily or weekly, maybe you let it pile up. But at the end of the month, you'll go, hey, wait a minute, where is all the money at for these tickets that we sold or that are no longer here?" Lydic said. "You could possibly get away with that for a while, but eventually, it is going to catch up."
KDKA asked Lydic if it would be smarter for a clerk to steal cash out of the register than it would be to steal a lottery ticket, and he said simply, "Yeah. You don't want to mess with the lottery."
