The identity of an Oregon Lottery player who won a $6.4 million jackpot on a ticket sold in Bend in August has been revealed — sort of.

Wednesday, Oregon Lottery officials confirmed that the winning Megabucks ticket has been claimed by an Iraqi man who bought the ticket online.

Lottery spokesman Chuck Bauman said even for an agency that deals with long odds on a daily basis, the winner’s arrival at the Oregon Lottery offices in Salem early this month was a shocker.

“When he came in, I’m sitting there saying to myself, ‘Never before, never again,’” Bauman said.

The winning ticket, lottery officials learned, had been purchased through an Israel-based website called thelotter.com, which sells tickets for lotteries around the world. Bauman said as best as anyone can tell, the website had a representative buy the ticket at Binky’s, a deli at the corner of SE Third Street and Reed Market Road in Bend.

Judy Bell Putas, one of the owners of Binky’s, said she was unfamiliar with the website prior to the emergence of the Iraqi winner. Putas said Binky’s has many customers who buy multiple lottery tickets, and a buyer working on behalf of foreign players wouldn’t necessarily attract attention.

In a “Frequently Asked Questions” section on thelotter.com, the site’s operators claim they make money by charging a premium for tickets. As of Wednesday, the site was offering tickets for drawings as far-flung as South Africa, Brazil and Ukraine — six plays for the Oregon Megabucks game were listed at $9, while a player who purchased the same tickets at an Oregon Lottery retailer would pay $3.

As the outlet that sold the winning ticket, Binky’s owners will collect $64,000, or 1 percent of the jackpot.

In awarding the prize — the winner has opted for 25 annual payments of $256,000 per year before taxes and has already received his first installment — lottery officials agreed to bend the rules to accommodate the man’s desire to remain anonymous. Ordinarily, the names of lottery winners are considered a public record, Bauman said, but officials determined making his name public could put him at risk in his home country.

“He has got circumstances that most winners coming through our door are not going to have, in terms of dangers and where he lives,” Bauman said.

Bauman said the lottery has made exceptions in the past, recalling an instance in which a prison guard in Eastern Oregon won a smaller prize through the state’s keno game. When an inmate mentioned the prize to the guard, the guard asked officials to remove her name from the list of winners regularly released by the lottery, and her request was granted.

The Oregon Lottery does not sell tickets over the Internet, but Bauman said lottery officials determined the sale of a ticket through a third party like thelotter.com does not run afoul of lottery rules or federal laws governing online gambling.

— Reporter: 541-383-0387, shammers@bendbulletin.com