NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Thousands of New Yorkers thought they had won up to $100,000 over the weekend in the New York Daily News Scratch 'n' Match game -- until the newspaper ran a correction.

While the News ran a notice touting a "special announcement" on the front page of Monday editions, readers didn't know about the correction until they opened the paper. Stories about the flap ran in rival papers including Newsday and the New York Times.

The contest started like any other of the newspaper's Scratch games: over the weekend, the News contained eight cards with scratch-off boxes. Every day, the newspaper prints numbers indicating which boxes to scratch off. Getting the right combination would yield prizes from $25 to $100,000.

This weekend, when the paper directed players to scratch off a wrong number on their game cards, many players were mistakenly led to believe that they had won.

Eileen Murphy, a Daily News spokeswoman, said the company that administers the game, D. L. Blair of Garden City, N.Y., sent the wrong number to the newspaper for publication.

"We're as upset as our readers and we're determined to get to the bottom of how this happened," she said in a statement.

Readers were told to submit what they believed to be their winning tickets for a random drawing in the future. But more prizes than intended cannot be handed out, according to the Daily News.

D. L. Blair apologized for the error in a statement, but the company could not be reached for comment.

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