Posted on 08/02/2005 12:12:07 AM PDT by MissouriConservative
They can pay her now. Or pay her more later. No jury in the state will side with the lotto on this.
I might very well side with the lotto if I were a juror. It would depend on what the rules of the game and the laws governing it say..
"an abbreviation"
You would think they would have the sense to be extremely forthcoming and show why the ticket was a misprint, to everyone's satisfaction.
If I were in Florida right now, I would not play their lottery until they do.
What's the point if they won't either pay or make an adequate public explanation (complete with images and annotations) why they will not?
If enough people smell a rat, their till take should drop off considerably.
Yup. The state should put their money where their mouth is. The have been benefiting all this time from lottery proceeds, so it's not like they are some impartial observer who is the victim of bad printing.
They wouldn't want to take this into civil suit land. All she would need is nine folks to agree, and they WOULD agree.
You´re absolutely right. But Florida should have enough experience with recounts of litte confusing cards, shouldn´t it?
Unless they actually see a hit in their take in connection with a public outcry, they're not going to want to bother.
This ticket is going to get subpoenaed for sure, though what follows afterwards is anybody's guess.
Lawsuit time, big time. Fraud. Treble damages.
i'm sure Bush is somehow involved. he probably set up the machines or something. it's his fault.
Bet they'll blame Diebold.
The coming lawsuit over scratchers should be over the deceptive way they are marketed. They all have pretty simple games that look like they have a fairly good chance of winning. Match this roll of the die and win big bucks, or some such. Now a person could get the impression from that that he has a one-in-36 chance of winning the big bucks. Of course, only a certain number of winners are printed, and the different rolls of the dice are not random, so the odds of winning are much, much lower.
Which is where the lawsuit comes in. The purpose of the deceptive game is, obviously, to encourage people to play. But they are being encouraged to play a game that is rigged against them. It would be very easy for the state to print not deceptive tickets, such as "scratch off and reveal a 10-digit code number. If it matches the number printed above, you win! Then the astronomical odds are obvious to anyone who plays the game.
Now, since every individual player is out only a buck or two, it will be necessary to file the lawsuit as a class action. But the class of people is ripped off to the tune of Billions of Dollars. That's a lot of zeros, buddy. A lawyer could live very well on a third of that pile...
They do. That's why they aren't paying up.
Florida does not have to pay up. The ticket was not misleading to the purchaser, except in as much as all scratcher tickets are misleading to the purchaser. They win based on the control code printed on them. The scratched portion merely indicates to the consumer whether or not the control code indicates the ticket is a winner. For instance, you could take your tickets back to the lottery agency for verification without even bothering to scratch them.
No tickee, no shirtee. If the control code doesn't match, the ticket is a loser.
Give her the freakin' cash, you deadbeats.
Scratch tickets have multiple ways of determining whether it's a winner or not, specifically to identify tampering and misprints. The game itself is meaningless. There are letters scattered over the ticket that represent money winnings like T-W-O for two dollars, as well as individual bar codes that are tied to ticket value in the lottery computers. Her ticket was a misprint in the game area, but the rest of the parts didn't match a big ticket winner.
Lotteries are a tax on stupid people.
The Florida lottery states that 500 million tickets are printed each year. Let's assume they sell most of them in a given year. The net result after paying lottery winners I am sure is in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
For crying out load GIVE THE WOMAN HER $250,000!
I think that when the dust settles on this, Tina will have something close to her $250,000 dollars and her lawyer will have a happy smile on his face.
If a store is required to sell a product for the price it inadvertently mismarked on the item, why should the FloriDUH Lottery Commission get to play by a different set of rules?
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