The file landed on Rob Sand’s desk with something less than a thud. Despite holding the contents of an investigation still open after more than two years, the file was barely half an inch thick. “Happy birthday,” his boss said.Get more news about 菲律宾彩票包网公司,you can vist loto98.com

It was not Rob Sand’s birthday. His boss, an Iowa deputy attorney general named Thomas H. Miller, was retiring in July 2014 after nearly three decades of prosecuting everything from murder to fraud. He hired Sand about four years earlier and made him the youngest prosecutor in a nine-attorney team that handled challenging cases all over the state. Now Miller was offloading cases to colleagues. This one, having to do with a suspicious lottery ticket worth $16.5 million, was full of dead ends. Investigators didn’t even know if a crime had been committed. The most tantalizing pieces of evidence were on a DVD: two grainy surveillance clips from a gas station. Sand slid the disc into his laptop and pressed play.

A man walked into a QuikTrip convenience store just off Interstate 80 in Des Moines. It was a weekday afternoon, two days before Christmas. The hood of the man’s black sweatshirt was pulled over his head, obscuring his face from two surveillance cameras overhead. Under the hoodie, he appeared to be wearing a ball cap; over the hoodie, he wore a black jacket. The man grabbed a fountain drink and two hot dogs.

The man pulled two pieces of paper from his pocket. They were play slips for Hot Lotto, a Powerball-like lottery game available in 14 states and Washington, D.C. A player — or the game’s computer — picked five numbers between 1 and 39 and then a sixth number, known as the Hot Ball, between 1 and 19. The prize for getting the first five numbers right was $10,000. But a much larger prize that varied according to the number of players who bought tickets went to anyone who got all six numbers right. The record Hot Lotto jackpot of nearly $20 million had been claimed in 2007. The jackpot at the time of this video was approaching the record. The stated odds of winning it were one in 10,939,383.

The cashier took the man’s play slips, which had already been filled out with multiple sets of numbers. At 3:24 p.m., the cashier ran the slips through the lottery terminal. An older man with a cane limped by the refrigerated section. A bus drove by. The cashier handed over his change. Once outside, the man pulled down his hood and removed his cap, got into his S.U.V. and drove away. The gas-station parking lot gleamed; there had been snow flurries that afternoon.

Two years into the case, that was virtually all the investigators had. Sand watched the video again and again, trying to pick up every little detail: the S.U.V.’s make; the man’s indistinct appearance: most likely in his 40s, and 100 pounds overweight, maybe more; the tenor of his voice.

Sand, a baby-faced Iowan who turned down Harvard Law School for the University of Iowa College of Law, had a background that seemed perfect for the case: a high school job writing computer code and doing tech support, a specialty in white-collar crime. His recent cases included securities fraud and theft by public officials.

The ticket in the video was purchased on Dec. 23, 2010. Six days later, the winning Hot Lotto numbers were selected: 3, 12, 16, 26, 33, 11. The next day, the Iowa Lottery announced that a QuikTrip in Des Moines had sold the winning ticket. But one month after the numbers were drawn, no one had presented the ticket.

The Iowa Lottery held a news conference. Phone calls poured in; dozens of people claimed to be the winner. Some said they had lost the ticket. Others said it was stolen from them. But lottery officials had crucial evidence that wasn’t publicly available: the serial number on the winning ticket and the video of the man buying it. One by one, they crossed off prospective claimants. One caller said his friend was a regular Hot Lotto player who had just died in a car wreck — should he go to the junkyard to search through his deceased friend’s car?Three months after the winning ticket was announced, the lottery issued another public reminder. Another followed at six months and again at nine months, each time warning that winners had one year to claim their money. “I was convinced it would never be claimed,” says Mary Neubauer, the Iowa Lottery’s vice president of external relations. Since 1999, she had dealt with around 200 people who had won more than $1 million; she’d never seen a winning million-dollar ticket go unclaimed. “And then comes Nov. 9, 2011.”

A man named Philip Johnston, a lawyer from Quebec, called the Iowa Lottery and gave Neubauer the correct 15-digit serial number on the winning Hot Lotto ticket. Neubauer asked his age — in his 60s, he said — and what he was wearing when he purchased the ticket. His description, a sports coat and gray flannel dress pants, did not match the QuikTrip video. Then, in a subsequent call, the man admitted he had “fibbed”; he said he was helping a client claim the ticket so the client wouldn’t be identified.

This was against the Iowa Lottery rules, which require the identities of winners to be public. Johnston floated the possibility of withdrawing his claim. Neubauer was suspicious: The winner’s anonymity was worth $16.5 million?