Guardia di Finanza seizes €25m in Italian scratchcard fraud probe
Five former employees of an Italian gaming concessionaire are accused of using insider access to pick out winning Gratta e Vinci tickets before they reached shops.
Italy's financial police, the Guardia di Finanza, has frozen more than €25 million ($27.98 million) in property, vehicles and financial holdings belonging to five former staff of a gaming concessionaire, as part of an investigation into alleged manipulation of the Gratta e Vinci scratchcard lottery.
The concessionaire itself has not been accused of wrongdoing. Prosecutors instead allege that the five individuals used privileged access to the company's internal systems to work out which scratchcards would be winners before those cards ever reached a retail counter, according to La Stampa.
The newspaper reported that the group is suspected of singling out four big winning tickets ahead of distribution: two carrying prizes of €7 million each and two worth €5 million apiece.
Investigators believe the suspects used confidential login credentials to get into the gaming company's servers, giving them the ability to inspect or alter data and identify which tickets would pay out before they went on sale.
Rather than cashing in the tickets themselves, the accused are alleged to have arranged for friends and family members to buy the pre-identified winners from different shops around the country, a method prosecutors say was intended to disguise the fraud and make the money harder to trace back.
The Guardia di Finanza described the asset freeze as a precautionary step to protect the public purse, pending recovery of funds linked to the alleged damage caused by the scheme. The seizure covers 25 properties along with a number of vehicles and other financial assets held by the five suspects.
A court must now decide whether the seizure order will stand, be amended or be lifted, as criminal and accounting investigations into the case continue. The Italian Revenue Agency is the party that would be entitled to any restitution should the fraud allegations be upheld.
The five former employees face multiple charges connected to the alleged scheme, iGaming Business reported, as authorities signal a tougher stance on protecting the integrity of the country's state-linked lottery games.
The case lands at a tense moment for Italian gambling regulation. The trade body EGP-FIPE told the Senate in June that the sector was stuck in what it called a "regulatory deadlock", warning that unregulated gambling activity risked expanding in the absence of a coherent national reform framework.
EGP-FIPE argued that this lack of reform had left the industry "frozen", making it harder to plan networks effectively and weakening safeguards designed to address problem gambling.