Buy a lottery ticket and your bank sends you a confirmation SMS. Then, usually, nothing — because checking a ticket means finding the SMS, finding the draw, and comparing six numbers by eye. Small wins go unnoticed, and unnoticed wins expire.

LottoTracker reads those SMSes, remembers every ticket, and checks them all against the real draw results.

First, whether it is for you

It is specific to South Africa, and currently to Standard Bank. Two separate assumptions are built in.

The lottery is the South African National Lottery — Lotto, Lotto Plus 1, Lotto 5 Max, PowerBall, PowerBall XTRA and Daily Lotto — with results from the operator's own public feed. And the SMS wording is Standard Bank's, in both the version used before the June 2026 operator handover and the version used after it.

If you bank elsewhere, everything except the message parser works unchanged, and teaching it your bank's wording is the only work.

What it does

• Pulls the lottery messages off an Android phone, by USB cable or over Wi-Fi.
• Reads out the ticket reference, the numbers, the game, the start date, how many draws you bought and what you paid.
• Fetches the draw results, including for draws from before the 2026 handover.
• Works out every draw you actually paid to enter, scores each line, expands Multiplay entries properly, and prices each win.
• Flags what is still claimable, and when each prize expires.

One ticket is usually several entries. A "plus" game cannot be bought on its own — the lottery requires the base game, and runs a separate draw with its own prizes for each level. So a Lotto Plus 2 ticket is three entries with three chances, not one, and all three get checked. Which levels you paid for is worked out from the price, because the game name in the SMS only ever names the highest one — and since June 2026 it does not name it at all.

A ticket nobody can check is not a ticket that lost. Entries that predate the available results data, or that sit in a pool no source publishes, are reported as uncheckable and kept out of the totals rather than counted as losses. That works per entry, so a ticket checkable in one draw and not another is still scored on the one that can be.

Your messages stay yours

Worth being explicit about, because the code is public.

The USB route filters on the phone: only messages containing lotto or powerball ever cross to the computer, and nothing else is read. That is a keyword filter rather than a sender filter, so a personal message mentioning the lottery would come across too — glance at the dump before sharing it anywhere.

The message dump and the results cache are excluded from version control, and there is a checker that verifies this by comparing every tracked file against the dump itself, rather than against a guessed pattern — so it catches a real message pasted into a document as an "example", not just a stray file.

Nothing is uploaded anywhere. The only outbound requests are to public lottery results pages.

Where it stands

In beta, on Linux, with no account, no API key and nothing paid. It needs Python and a couple of standard tools from your distribution to talk to the phone. The tray icon needs one extra library — and it is the only thing that does, so everything works without it.