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Lottery & Crypto
South Bend has played the state's game since the first scratch-off tickets were sold on October 13, 1989, and the published record of that play is specific: no South Bend ticket has ever won a Powerball or Mega Millions jackpot, and the city's biggest documented lottery story is a $4 million Hoosier Lotto jackpot drawn on April 7, 2004, on a ticket bought in this city by a South Bend couple. Around the state game stand the older and smaller forms — the licensed bingo and raffle nights of the parishes, posts, and lodges, which enter the written record here mainly when the state's charity-gaming regulators wrote a South Bend post into a disciplinary order — and one gambling house that is not the state's at all: Four Winds Casino South Bend, the Pokagon Band's sovereign casino on the city's south side, whose own record belongs to the Story of South Bend section and the Tribes account and which appears in this section only where its 2016 agreement with the city puts documented money into city hands. Cryptocurrency, the newer windfall, reaches the city's record later and thinner than it reached Fort Wayne's: no crypto firm founded here, no institution's adoption, one federal prosecution in which Bitcoin served as a deposit, and the bitcoin kiosks that stood in the city's stores until Indiana — the first state in the nation to do it — banned the machines outright on March 9, 2026.
The numbers, before the state sold them
Before 1989
The illegal game: For most of the twentieth century the everyday lottery of American cities was the numbers game — policy, in the older name — a three-digit daily wager banked by whoever would hold the bets. South Bend had the…
The Hoosier Lottery arrives
November 8, 1988 — January 31, 2010
The vote and the first ticket: Indiana had banned lotteries in its constitution since 1851. On November 8, 1988, the state's voters lifted the ban, approving the lottery referendum by 62 percent. The General Assembly ratified the…
The Bridges jackpot
April 7, 2004
The largest documented win by city residents: In the record reached, the biggest lottery prize ever won by South Bend residents is the Hoosier Lotto jackpot of Wednesday, April 7, 2004. The Hoosier Lottery announced on Friday…
The television show's South Bend roll
1989 — December 31, 2005
Hoosier Millionaire: For sixteen years the Lottery's public face was a television program, and South Bend names stand in its record at the size the press kept them. Dr. Hansel Foley, a South Bend physician who served as the…
A million dollars at halftime
September 23, 2012
Greg Langel's second chance: The city's second documented million-dollar prize was not drawn from a drum of numbered balls but from a drum of envelopes, on a football field. Greg Langel of South Bend — a graphic designer and the…
The rest of the documented roll
2023 — 2026
The $50,000 tier: Below the jackpots, the Lottery's own publications keep two South Bend names at the $50,000 level. Patrick Ward of South Bend won $50,000 playing Powerball; the Lottery's fiscal-2025 annual report carries him in…
Bingo, raffles, and the license
June 1992 — 2025
The licensed small game: Alongside the state lottery, Indiana law has long allowed a second, smaller tier of legal chance: charity gaming, in which qualified nonprofit organizations — religious, charitable, fraternal, veterans'…
The ticket that was not a winner
June 3, 2026
A statewide dispute, carried on this city's air: The one lottery controversy of the record that reached South Bend's audience at size was not a South Bend player's. On June 3, 2026, within hours of the game's launch, the Hoosier…
Where the money goes
1989 —
The three funds: After prizes and expenses, the Hoosier Lottery's surplus is divided by law among three destinations: the Indiana State Teachers' Retirement Fund and the Pension Relief Fund — the police and firefighters' pension…
Four Winds: the city's side of the agreement
2016 — January 25, 2025
Pointer, by design: Four Winds Casino South Bend — opened January 16, 2018, on some 166 acres the United States took into trust for the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians on November 28, 2016 — is the first tribally owned and…
Crypto: the frame, at true size
2021 — 2026
One paragraph of context, then the city: Cryptocurrency — Bitcoin first, from 2009 — spent a decade as a speculation conducted on exchanges and phones before it touched most American institutions at all, and South Bend's…
The one Bitcoin prosecution
August 2022 — sentenced 2023
Crypto as the deposit, not the fraud: The only release of the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Indiana reached in which Bitcoin does documented work in a South Bend case is not a fraud case, and it is printed here at…
The kiosks, and the ban
January 2025 — March 9, 2026
Where South Bend actually met crypto: For most residents the city's cryptocurrency infrastructure was never an app or an exchange; it was a kiosk in a store. Coinme-powered Coinstar machines and their competitors sold Bitcoin for…