He Walked In for an Interview. He Walked Out with Stolen Tickets.
Florence County, South Carolina, is not exactly the first place you’d picture a heist unfolding. But on May 5, 2025, a 36-year-old man named Antonio Levon Ricard Stewart did something that sounds like the setup to a bad joke. He showed up for an employment screening. He also, according to prosecutors, walked away with a pack of lottery tickets he had no business taking.
Stewart was not a stranger to the area. He was not a career criminal with a dossier of prior offenses. He was, by all accounts, a man who decided that a job interview was the perfect cover for a small act of theft. The target? A stack of South Carolina Education Lottery tickets sitting in the workplace where he was being screened. The method? Simply grab them. Walk out. Cash a few at a gas station down the road. Done.
Except it was not done. Not even close.
Stewart made his first attempt at a Friendly Neighbor gas station, where he managed to redeem at least one $5 ticket. That single successful cash-in is the only part of his scheme that actually worked. From there, the dominoes started falling in a direction he clearly had not anticipated.
Three Stops, Two Rejections, One Arrest Waiting
After the Friendly Neighbor incident, Stewart headed to a Carolina C Store, where he tried to cash two more tickets. Both were rejected. He then drove to a Refuel location and attempted three additional redemptions. All three were turned down as well.
Five tickets rejected across two stores. One ticket cashed. The math should have told Stewart something was off, but instead he apparently kept trying, hoping the next clerk would not flag the tickets or that the system would not catch up.
The system caught up. And it caught up fast enough that by August 2026, more than a year after the initial theft, Stewart was in handcuffs. The gap between the crime and the arrest might seem long, but lottery fraud investigations in South Carolina move at the pace of paperwork, cross-referencing, and waiting for the right evidence to line up before prosecutors file charges.
“Before a ticket can even be registered as eligible, it has to reach one of the retailers, which then scans it and communicates the registration back to the lottery’s headquarters.”
That single mechanism, the retailer scan-and-report loop, is what doomed Stewart’s plan. Every ticket in the South Carolina Education Lottery system is tracked. When a ticket is printed at a vendor or workplace, it enters a digital chain of custody. The moment someone tries to redeem it at a different location, the system cross-checks. If the ticket was reported stolen, flagged, or simply does not match the redemption pattern expected, the clerk’s terminal rejects it.
Stewart’s five rejected tickets were not just unlucky. They were the system working exactly as designed.
The Security Net Nobody Wants to Test
South Carolina’s lottery infrastructure is not a single point of failure. It is a layered network. Retailers scan tickets at the point of sale and at the point of redemption. Those scans feed back to a central database. There is a 24/7 hotline where anyone, a store clerk, a vendor, a suspicious employee, can report a stolen ticket in real time. Surveillance cameras in participating stores capture the face of every person who approaches the counter with a ticket in hand.
None of this is secret. It is public information. The South Carolina Education Lottery publishes its fraud-prevention protocols. The hotline number is on the back of every ticket. The warning about stolen tickets is printed in small type that most winners never read, but that prosecutors read carefully when they build a case.
Stewart, it seems, either did not read the fine print or assumed he could slip through the cracks. He got one ticket through. The other five told the story of a man testing a system he had not fully understood.
Florence County Detention Center and a 15-Year Sentence on the Table
Stewart is currently being held at the Florence County Detention Center. He faces three counts of intent to defraud the lottery, a charge that carries serious weight under South Carolina state law. The maximum exposure is 15 years in prison and a fine of up to $150,000.
For a man who stole a pack of tickets worth, at most, a few dollars in face value, that is a disproportionately severe penalty. But the charge is not about the dollar amount of the tickets. It is about the intent. Prosecutors are not charging Stewart with petty larceny. They are charging him with a deliberate, premeditated attempt to defraud a state-run institution. The three counts likely correspond to the three separate redemption attempts or the act of taking the tickets with the specific intent to cash them fraudulently.
There is also a collateral consequence that Stewart may not have considered. If he is found guilty, state law bars him from receiving any lottery prizes in South Carolina. No matter how many times he buys a scratch-off in the future, no matter how many numbers he circles on a Powerball ticket, a win would be legally uncollectible. The state would keep the money. His name would be on a restricted list.
He went to an interview hoping to land a paycheck. Instead, he landed in a detention center with a felony charge hanging over him and a potential quarter-decade of his life on the line. The $5 ticket he did manage to cash at the Friendly Neighbor station was, by any measure, the worst investment of his adult life.
A Pattern the Lottery Sees More Often Than You’d Think
Stewart’s case is not an anomaly. Lottery fraud, particularly the theft-and-redeem scheme, is a known problem across state lotteries. The South Carolina Education Lottery’s 24/7 hotline exists precisely because store clerks and vendor employees do encounter people trying to cash tickets they did not legitimately purchase. The hotline allows those reports to be logged and the tickets flagged before a second or third attempt is made.
In Stewart’s case, the timeline suggests the report was filed shortly after the initial theft, likely by the employer or a coworker who noticed the tickets were missing. The one successful redemption at the Friendly Neighbor station may have been the only window before the flag went up. After that, every attempt was a rejection, and every rejection was another data point in the investigation.
The surveillance footage from the Carolina C Store and the Refuel location would have provided the final piece. Faces, timestamps, the specific tickets held up to the scanner. None of it is guesswork. It is recorded, timestamped, and filed.
Stewart’s case is now in the hands of the Florence County Solicitor’s office. A trial date has not been publicly confirmed as of this writing, but the detention and the three counts of intent to defraud suggest prosecutors believe they have a solid file. The 15-year maximum is a statutory ceiling, not a guarantee. Actual sentencing will depend on the judge, Stewart’s prior record, and whether he cooperates with the investigation.
What is certain is that the job he went to interview for, whatever it was, is no longer on the table. And the lottery tickets he wanted to use as a shortcut to a few extra dollars have cost him far more than the face value of any ticket in that pack.
Topics: Florence County · gambling fraud · lottery crime · South Carolina · theft
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