TORONTO - Ontario's gaming corporation is touting new technology that scans billions of sales for patterns in a bid to stamp out lottery fraud at the embattled agency.

Ontario Lottery and Gaming says the program -- Data Analysis and Retrival Technology, or DART -- creates a profile of the buyer of each ticket, which can then be used to narrow down the original buyer when there is a disputed lottery jackpot.

The program, which analyzes 1.2 billion transactions each year, can cut months worth of manual search time down to several minutes, the OLG said Wednesday as it demonstrated the technology for media.

"Prior to DART, we would be asking our prize payment people and investigating people, 'climb Everest and here is your chisel,' " said Fariba Anderson, the OLG's information technology spokeswoman.

"With DART... now we have equipped them with proper mountain-climbing gear."

But Anderson emphasized that the program is just one of many tools used in the investigative process.

The technology has been in use since June. The highest profile application came in September after provincial police laid fraud charges against convenience store clerk Jun-Chul Chung, and his children Kenneth and Kathleen Chung, who allegedly stole a ticket that went on to win a $12.5-million jackpot.

The OLG used DART in that case to create a profile of what the agency calls the "rightful" ticket buyer. That profile indicates the ticket was purchased at That's Entertainment video store in St. Catharines in 2003.

The technology determined that the ticket buyer lived and worked in St. Catharines and Burlington at the time, and that the ticket may have been bought by a group.

The OLG says it has questioned hundreds of people who have since come forward claiming the ticket, and checked their responses against the profile.

So far, 593 people have answered the questions correctly enough to warrant further investigation by provincial police.

The DART technology is among the changes ushered in after the Ontario government called in police three years ago -- an action prompted by a damning provincial ombudsman's report that accused lottery retailers of collecting millions of dollars in "dishonest" winnings.

That led to criminal charges and changes, including requiring winners to sign tickets before handing them over to store clerks, and banning lottery retailers from buying tickets in their own stores.

In June, convenience store owner Hafiz Malik was sentenced to one year in jail for stealing and claiming a $5.7-million prize.

OLG chief investigator Steven Byrd said DART creates profiles for quick pick tickets, but it is easier for the program to detect patterns when someone consistently plays the same numbers at the same retailer.

Hewlett Packard and Microsoft both provide the system.

Microsoft spokesman Chris Brakel said DART is capable of pinpointing the time of purchase to the nanosecond, which can then be cross-referenced with time stamps on surveillance video or points card swipes.

"When you take that information and you pair that with surveillance video and all the rest, when you're conducting an investigation you can use that information from DART and start filling in quite a big chunk of information," he said.