News writer; Opinion columnist
One of the most widely discussed stories in the lottery world is the April 2023 $95 Lotto Texas drawing.
After an anonymous New Jersey-based LLC named Rook TX claimed the jackpot, it was revealed that the winning players guaranteed themselves a win by purchasing over 25 million tickets for the drawing, covering every possible combination.
The conventional wisdom is that the backers of Rook TX were wealthy European gamblers who hired lottery courier services, including Lottery.com, to carry out the logistics of purchasing millions of tickets.
However, according to a well-placed source who spoke with Lottery USA, what everyone thinks they know about Rook TX could be entirely wrong.
Lottery USA has reviewed documents, conducted interviews, watched Texas Senate hearings, and reviewed text messages and communications related to the Lotto Texas April 2023 jackpot win and uncovered information showing that Lottery.com executives may have been the masterminds behind the entire operation.
The big buy
To purchase 25 million combinations in the three days between drawings, Rook TX allegedly systematically printed millions of tickets using four different lottery ticket courier services, including Lottery.com. Close to 60 lottery terminals were apparently used to pull off this scheme.
IGT (International Gaming Technologies) provided the terminals with the express permission of Gary Grief and the Texas Lottery Commission. Lottery.com received several terminals despite being out of compliance with Texas Lottery regulations and inactive as a courier service for several months before the drawing.
Who is Gary Grief?
Gary Grief was the Director of the Texas Lottery Commission for over a decade before retiring unexpectedly in early 2024. Grief had a close relationship with the founders of Lottery.com and personally encouraged them to move their business from California to Texas in 2017.
Public information requests reveal that Mr. Grief was given specific details about the Lotto Texas April 2023 jackpot fraud in writing and asked to investigate. Just months later, he retired.
The Interview
Lottery USA spoke with a well-connected Lottery insider who gave us a deeper understanding of how Lottery.com may have orchestrated the April 2023 Lotto Texas drawing with help from the Texas Lottery Commission.
They have requested to remain anonymous for their safety and to discuss highly sensitive information.
Q: When did Lottery.com begin planning to take down a Lotto Texas jackpot?
A: Former employees of Lottery.com have come forward and said that in 2020-2021, the three founders (Tony DiMatteo, Matthew Clemenson, and CFO Ryan Dickinson) were asking their in-house tech team to try to develop a system to buy every possible lottery combination. They called it pro-buying. At that same time, the company was working with Spinola Gaming out of Malta on developing tech products for the company.
Q: What kind of tech products was Spinola developing for Lottery.com?
A: The Houston Chronicle named Spionla Gaming as the company that supplied the illegal software Lottery.com used during the Lotto Texas event. These programs allowed them to print lottery tickets faster than the IGT terminals could in regular operation.
Note from the author: SEC filings show that Lottery.com terminated Ryan Dickinson for cause in June 2021. An internal investigation revealed that he sold hundreds of thousands of Texas lottery tickets across state lines from 2019 through 2022.
However, despite revealing this information publicly, Dickinson faced no criminal charges and was not investigated by the Texas Lottery Commission.
Q: Dickinson was terminated with cause in 2021. Was he still involved with the April 2023 ticket printing operation?
A: Eyewitness reports from former Lottery.com employees claim that Tony Di Mateo and Ryan Dickinson were present while the tickets were printed for the April 2023 Lotto Texas drawing.
Q: Why were former Lottery.com executives and founders in the room printing the tickets for the Lotto Texas April 2023 event?
A: If you're Tony De Mateo and Ryan Dickinson, why are you in the room for the Lotto Texas event printing tickets with your family members? Why would you be there if you don't have something to gain in the outcome? Tony DiMatteo had essentially left the company at this point. He was a consultant getting paid $1,000 a month. Why would Tony come out of hibernation, so to speak, and be running around Texas trying to get Lotto retailer licenses signed up quickly, get paper delivered, and get all this stuff? Why would Ryan Dickinson be there, and why would Ryan's kids be there if he was not making money from the effort? They had to know it was a crime. Why are they there?
Q: One of the more explosive revelations is a video that allegedly shows children using the lottery ticket machines in the Lottery.com office.
A: Lottery USA has seen the video in question. It shows multiple lottery ticket terminals placed on temporary plastic tables in what appears to be a Class B office space. The machines are printing hundreds of tickets at a time, and they are hooked up to electronic devices. Multiple people are sitting in office chairs in front of the IGT-issued terminals, and what appears to be two minor children are sitting in white office chairs in front of the lottery terminals. One is a boy, and one is a girl.
A witness identified them as Ryan Dickinson's children. A black backpack is shown in the video, and that backpack has a unique series of colorful patches on it. That backpack has been identified as belonging to Ryan Dickinson.
Q: Was Lottery.com still in business when the April 2023 Lotto Texas drawing happened?
A: No, they weren't bankrupt, but they were insolvent. Once they learned about the illegal ticket scheme, they terminated their operations and laid off all their employees. Technically, the business still existed, but it was no longer active.
Q: The video also shows the lottery machines in what looks like a regular office. Is that legal?
A: According to Texas Lottery Commission retailer regulations, terminals must be located in brick-and-mortar stores open to the public and engaged in businesses other than selling lottery tickets. None of these things are true about the Lottery.com office space.
Additionally, Lottery.com wasn't eligible to receive those IGT lottery terminals because they did not have an established sweep bank account that allows the Texas Lottery Commission to collect money from all ticket sales automatically. That's a strict rule. If you violate it more than once, you can be banned for life from selling tickets.
This means the Texas Lottery Commission let an insolvent company publicly named in prior lottery crimes in Texas print millions of lottery tickets without any proof or guarantee that Texas would be paid for those lottery tickets. It is against the law in Texas to allow lottery tickets to be printed on credit.
Also, why would IGT spend several hours installing and connecting these terminals when they are in an office? They're the biggest lottery hardware company in the country. They know that's illegal. Why would IGT deliver pallets of millions of paper play slips to a parking lot to be used in the Lotto Texas 2023 scheme? And now remember, IGT is getting paid 2% on every ticket printed.
Greg Potts, the COO of Lottery.com, testified at a Texas Senate hearing last month that multiple IGT reps were present in the office while the tickets were printed.
Q: We did the math and found that even with the extra terminals, the ticket machines needed to print over three tickets a second to create 25 million tickets in just three days. How is that possible?
A: There are three ways for a regular person to enter a Lotto Texas ticket. One is to walk into a store, fill out a paper play slip, and scan it into the machine. You can do up to five entries per play slip this way.
The other way is to walk over to the terminal and use your finger to touch the number combos you want. You can do that up to five times at the terminal. Both of those things take a lot of time.
Finally, you can use the Lotto Texas app, which allows you to create a QR code with up to ten tickets per entry, which you must scan into a machine.
None of those three ways work when you've got 72 hours to print 25 million tickets and change. So they built a system with QR codes that held more numbers that could be uploaded directly into the Texas lottery machines to allow those millions and millions of combinations to be fed into the machines.
Q: How did these QR codes work?
A: Eyewitnesses there for the Lotto Texas April 2023 event said a man walked into the Lottery.com office with a laptop and spreadsheet, which he connected to the IGT lottery terminal network. He walked up to one of the terminals and held a phone under it; 40 tickets popped out, and he turned around and gave everybody a thumbs up.
In the 17-second video, people are sitting there, tickets are printed, and nobody is inputting ticket numbers. Nobody is putting in play slips. And then you see, as it scrolls to the left, you definitely see a man sitting at a laptop that's opened with a flat-screen connected to it, and you can see a spreadsheet on it.
Furthermore, the systems were talking to each other. There were four locations where tickets were printed, but they couldn't duplicate numbers. Doing so would be a waste of money. They also had to know when to stop when they got all of them done.
The Houston Chronicle reported on telephone recordings of Lottery.com executives discussing the Lotto Texas event of April 2023 shortly after it had concluded, showing discussions about how effective the QR code system was in pulling off the Lotto Texas event.
Q: Do we know if Lottery.com officials had iPads or computers connected to the ticket terminals?
A: In the video with the kids, you can see plugs going into the terminals from phones and other devices they use to scan and create the custom QR codes. You can see things plugged into every one of the ticket terminals.
Q: Is it legal to connect personal devices to the ticket terminals?
A: No. There's a specific law in the books that clearly says no third-party electronic devices shall be connected to a Texas Lottery ticket terminal, either directly or wirelessly, without the permission of the Texas Lottery Commission. Should any such devices be connected without permission, all printed tickets are void or invalid.
The Texas Lottery Commission has gone on record that they never permitted anything to be hooked up to the terminals. That means every ticket printed in the Lotto Texas April 2023 event was void and invalid. That means the win should have been invalidated regardless of where the money came from to buy those tickets. Texas took in millions of dollars in revenue for tickets that were void under the laws of Texas.
Q: Is this another case where Lottery.com's close relationship with Gary Grief paid off?
A: Only 2 million Texans typically play the Lotto Texas game on a given week. So the commission would've known immediately on the Thursday before the drawing; wow, how are they printing so many tickets? They would've known it was impossible to do that under their standard procedures.
They use the daily ticket sales to report the estimated jackpot amount, and the Lotto Texas jackpot estimate went from about $70 million to $95 million in just 72 hours. This means IGT and the Texas Lottery Commission knew millions of tickets were being printed. Yet, they never investigated how 60 IGT terminals might have output an average of over 8 million lottery tickets per day.
Note from the author: Through his attorney, Gary Grief released the following statement: “Gary Grief was not involved with nor did he facilitate the 'bulk purchase' of Lotto Texas tickets. Further, he did not 'give the green light' as some suggested. This bulk purchase was unforeseen and unprecedented in Lotto Texas history and has never occurred before in Texas.”
Q: Do we know who actually put up the money to finance the entire operation? The tickets alone would cost over $25 million.
A: Not exactly, but we have an idea. The money was put forward by Colossus Bets, a company based in London that allows wealthy individuals to pool their money and anonymously place large bets on events. Colossus takes a percentage of the total amount bet and acts as a broker for their clients.
Q: How would Lottery.com executives get the millions of dollars in cash necessary to finance the operation if they were involved? The company hadn't made any money for several months.
A: SEC documents show that Ryan Dickinson transferred $16.5 million of Lottery.com's money to a company he controlled called Jay Stryker in 2021. Public records also show that a church in California filed a lawsuit against Tony, Matt, and Ryan for the theft of $2.7 million in cash in May 2022.
It's been reported in SEC documents that the company overpaid approximately $9 million in 2022 to purchase a Mexican subsidiary. And it's been further reported in a DOJ (Department of Justice) indictment unsealed this month that $9 million somehow disappeared in a Mexican transaction.
So when you add those three numbers up, it comes to exactly what you need to buy every combo.
Q: How would the ticket buyer have gotten that money to Colossus Bets in the UK without anyone knowing it was from them?
A: A former Lottery.com executive claims that the three founders traveled to Dubai together right after the company imploded. Matt Clemenson resigned from Lottery.com in June of 2022, just after the Board of Directors began questioning his activities in Dubai.
Somehow, millions of dollars made it to Colossus Bets in the UK and Colossus Bets. In sworn testimony given in a deposition in February of 2025, Greg Potts claimed that Colossus transferred that money to a U.S. law firm named Trowbridge Law in Michigan.
Trowbridge then delivered millions of dollars to Lottery.com while they were printing the Lotto Texas tickets. The following week, after Rook TX won the jackpot, Lottery.com wire transferred millions of dollars to the Texas Comptroller account as requested by the Texas Lottery Commission.
Q. Who is Ron Farah, and how is he involved in the Lotto Texas scandal?
A: Ron Farah was a convicted narcotics trafficker known as the largest importer of marijuana by a U.S. citizen in history. Reportedly working for Pablo Escobar, Farah was convicted as a narco kingpin and sentenced to life in Federal prison without parole. After serving over 15 years in Federal prison, Ron was pardoned by President Barack Obama in 2016.
In 2022, Mr. Farah began working with Lottery.com and was accused of defrauding a Florida resident of $1.8 million. Mr. Farah died in London in October of 2023, and after his death, his family authorized his cell phone to be forensically analyzed. Over 1,700 files were extracted from the phone, including hundreds of communications with Lottery.com executives and Board members.
These text messages indicate Mr. Farah was involved in the alleged Lotto Texas April 2023 crime, including communications on the event's planning, updates during the event, and post-Lotto Texas April 2023 event follow-up. These messages on his phone show that he was communicating regularly with the original Lottery.com founders Tony DiMatteo and Ryan Dickinson (both before and after the Lotto Texas April 2023 event) and also Lottery.com's current COO Greg Potts and current CEO and Board Chairman Matt McGahan before, during and after the Lotto Texas April 2023 event.
In one document retrieved from Mr. Farah's phone, McGahan writes:
“The atmosphere in the room must have been electric when those machines were turned on, and the tickets started printing. Talk about excellent 'timing.'”
McGahan then asks if the company had obtained a quote from the then-Texas Lottery Director (Gary Grief) so they could issue a press release. This communication was written on Monday, April 25, 2023, less than 48 hours after the Lotto Texas $95 million drawing.
In February 2025, a Federal Grand Jury indicted Lottery.com executive Vadim Komissarov on conspiracy to commit securities fraud, making false filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and obstruction of justice.
While the indictment does not specifically mention the Lotto Texas drawing, two Lottery.com founders are prominently mentioned as cooperating witnesses or co-conspirators.
Q: Where do we think things go from here? Will investigators uncover the full scope of the scandal, or will they try to sweep things under the rug?
A: The DOJ, as evidenced in the recently unsealed indictment involving Lottery.com, has strong investigative powers. The fact that two former Lottery.com executives are listed in that indictment as cooperating witnesses indicates evidence is being provided to law enforcement. There are ongoing investigations into the Lotto Texas event with the Texas Rangers, the Texas Attorney General's Office, and the Texas Lottery Commission.
Pending Lawsuits
Multiple lawsuits are also pending against the company, its former and current executives, and others involved. Texas lawmakers have called it the biggest criminal conspiracy involving money laundering and fraud in Texas since the Enron scandal. The alleged Lotto Texas April 23, 2023, scam may become the largest crime in the industry's history; with that, we hope the whole truth is revealed.
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