Lottery couriers are operating well within the scope of Texas law. That’s the message Lotto.com CEO Thomas Metzger sent to the world during a recent panel discussion at the recent SBC Summit Americas conference.
Metzger’s company is at the heart of a raging Lone Star State lottery controversy involving lottery couriers and a 25 million ticket purchase. The whole affair is so messy that some Texas lawmakers are calling for the dissolution of the Texas Lottery Commission and a wholesale restructuring of Texas Lottery rules. But Metzger maintains that his company not only operates within the boundaries of Texas law, but also that it operates under the full knowledge of the very lawmakers calling for its ejection from the state.
“We’ve never gone into a state without explicit permission from that state in writing. So, in the 12 states that we’re operating in, we walked through the front door,” he told the audience at the SBC Summit Americas conference.
Lotto.com is currently fighting efforts to ban its services in Texas and using correspondence with Texas Lottery Commission members as part of its defense. Metzger is particularly keen to change the perception that his company is operating in some sort of grey regulatory area. “We feel like, unfortunately, we’re a little bit of a victim of circumstance. There’s this misconception in Texas that we were somehow operating in the shadows,” he said.
Not only is Lotto.com fully regulated in Texas, Metzger noted, but he actually has been calling for more regulation (which must certainly be an oddity in the regulation-adverse Texas Statehouse).
Metzger expressed confidence that his company will win its Texas fight and build a permanent spot in the regulated gaming ecosystem.