A Texas man is suing after he says his lottery win was drastically reduced due to an illegal money laundering scheme.

Jerry Reed won the $7.5 million jackpot in the May 17, 2023, Lotto Texas drawing, according to the lawsuit.

But Reed said in the court filing that had it not been for a group of men engaging in an “illegal money laundering and game-rigging scheme,” he would have won much more.

On April 22, 2023, a company called Rook TX won the $95 million Lotto Texas jackpot, the lawsuit said.

This happened because the three founders of lottery.com came up with a scheme to rig the lottery, according to the lawsuit.

McClatchy News reached out to lottery.com for comment April 10 but did not immediately receive a response. Contact information for Rook TX wasn’t immediately available.

The three men solicited the help of foreign and domestic companies and individuals, then purchased every lottery number combination possible, buying 25.8 million Lotto Texas tickets, according to the civil complaint.

“This operation stands as one of the most significant lottery rigging cases in U.S. history,” the lawsuit said.

The three men hired a London-based company to fund the scheme and had four licensed lottery ticket retailers in Texas print the tickets for a percentage of the price for each ticket, the complaint said.

They had 72 hours to buy all 25.8 million tickets and used “custom-designed software, loaded onto smartphones, to generate a system of counterfeit QR codes that tricked the state-approved Texas Lottery terminals into recognizing the codes as if they had been generated by the Texas Lottery Commission’s authorized mobile app,” the lawsuit said.

This allowed them to print all the tickets they needed in the limited time they had, according to the complaint.

On April 22, 2023, only one ticket matched the game’s six winning numbers, and it was bought and printed out by the defendants, leading to their $95 million win, the lawsuit said.

In addition to the jackpot, the men had 288 tickets match five of the winning numbers, 16,925 tickets match four of the winning numbers and 377,360 tickets match three of the winning numbers, the complaint said.

This added an additional $2.4 million in prize money, according to the suit. The men chose to receive the jackpot as a one-time lump sum payment of $57,804,374, totaling their prize money to $60,264,030, the lawsuit said.

Texas State Senator Paul Bettencourt said during a court hearing that the way the men went about winning the jackpot was considered money laundering, according to the lawsuit.

After they won the jackpot, the lottery reset.

Reed said had the illegal scheme never happened, the $95 million would have rolled over and his May 17, 2023, lottery win would have totaled $102.5 million, according to the complaint.

Reed said in the lawsuit that the defendants “hold money” that “belongs” to him.

The lawsuit is asking for $95 million in damages.

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