The Luckiest Lotto Store in New York
Taylor Cook
On paper, a smoke shop on the edge of Newburgh – a small Hudson Valley city where more than one in four residents lives below the poverty line – sold more New York Lottery tickets in 2023 than Resorts World Casino, every deli in Brooklyn, and every newsstand in Manhattan, combined. It sold nearly 15 times more than the state’s second-biggest retailer. It moved $237 million worth of tickets out of a strip-mall storefront. The number looks impossible. That’s because it almost is. No brick-and-mortar smoke shop generates those numbers.
The answer lies in a growing but largely invisible corner of the gambling industry: the lottery courier. A lottery courier is a licensed third-party service that purchases official state lottery tickets on behalf of online customers, then scans and uploads the ticket to a user’s account. Licensed by the New York State Gaming Commission, these tech platforms let anyone with a smartphone buy official lottery tickets online – no gas station required. They route those orders through licensed retailers, inflating those stores’ sales figures in state records.
The $237 million figure is not a busy smoke shop. The dataset classifies that Newburgh location as “courier”, not a newsstand or convenience store. A lottery courier is a licensed tech platform, like Jackpocket or Lotto.com, that buys official tickets on behalf of online customers and routes those purchases through a physical licensed retailer’s address. Every app-based ticket order inflates that retailer’s sales figures. New York is one of only two states that formally license and regulate these services; the other is New Jersey.
The other 13 plus Smokes 4 Less locations, listed under the NEWS-SMOKE business type, look like normal Hudson Valley retail lottery spots, each selling $700K–$2.5M per year. Only the Courier-flagged Newburgh entry is an outlier.
The numbers confirm it: this single location accounted for nearly 10% of all Powerball sales in the entire state. It grew 165% year-over-year, from $89M to $237M, which tracks with a digital pipeline scaling up, not foot traffic increasing. That kind of volume has a side effect: winners.
Due to the sheer number of tickets sold, Smoke 4 Less has developed a reputation as a lottery hotspot. A New York Post article stated that the Newburgh location had sold its eighth million-dollar winning lotto ticket in a single week, calling it “possibly the luckiest shop in the entire Empire State” and generating massive press for the small strip mall smoke shop. The attention draws more players, and more players mean more winners, which draws even more attention.
“It’s a hot spot. There’s so much going on, I guess just because of how many winners we have, people come up from the whole place just to try their luck,” said Heaven, an employee at Smoke 4 Less since March. “We go through a lot of scratch off tickets, replace our receipt paper every couple days.”
Customers feel it too.
If I’m passing by this area, I’ll stop. I’ll pick up some groceries, poke my head in and get a few tickets.” One regular said. “I don’t know why. Just hot spot, so people come.”
But the luck isn’t magic, it’s math. Selling more tickets means a higher likelihood of those tickets winning. Yet not everyone inside the store has done that calculation. Gary, a customer who stopped in on his way to World Resort Casino, plays three or four tickets a day and follows news of big winners closely. Still, something didn’t add up to him.
“I follow these stories about stores that are winning,” he said at the counter. “But I can tell you this, I don’t see that kind of traffic coming in out the door.”
He’s right, because much of it isn’t coming through the door at all. Heaven, who rings up tickets daily, had no idea the store she worked at had sold $237 million worth of lottery tickets, or that an online courier operation was behind the volume.
“I know that some people come in and talk about a second chance thing, and that’s the only thing I know that they can do online,” she said.
The state’s public lottery dataset is built around physical retail locations. Every sale gets logged to an address. That system made sense when lottery tickets were only sold at bodegas, newsstands, and gas stations. It makes considerably less sense when a single storefront is processing millions of digital transactions on behalf of customers who may never set foot in Newburgh.
Online lottery access, enabled by couriers, removes nearly every friction point that once naturally limited how much a person could spend. There’s no drive to the store, no cash in hand, no moment of physical transaction that might prompt a second thought. Gambling researchers have long identified convenience as one of the strongest predictors of problematic play. The courier model, by design, maximizes convenience.
For the couriers themselves, the arrangement is straightforward: they are licensed, they are legal, and they are growing. Jackpot, one of the largest operators in the country, was acquired by Flutter Entertainment, the parent company of FanDuel, in 2024 for $750 million, a transaction that signaled just how seriously the sports betting industry views the digital lottery space as its next frontier. The money is moving online.
The courier model has grown rapidly since New York first licensed the services. Industry insiders say the total volume flowing through courier-affiliated retailers has more than doubled in three years. But because the state does not separately break out courier-originated sales in its public data, it is nearly impossible for outside researchers, journalists, or policymakers to track the true scale of the industry. The Smokes 4 Less entry is only visible as an outlier because its numbers are so extreme they break the pattern. Smaller courier operations, routing far less volume, would be effectively invisible in the data.
That opacity has drawn scrutiny from gambling reform advocates, who argue the courier industry has created a regulatory gray zone where it is technically licensed, but operating in ways the original licensing framework was never designed to anticipate.
For now, Smokes 4 Less sits atop New York’s lottery leaderboard – a smoke shop that isn’t really a smoke shop, in a city that can least afford to be the state’s biggest gambling hub.