Zot me if I’m wrong, but as far as scratch-offs go - if you scan the bar code on the back it will tell the prize amount, if any.
If that’s right, it’s very easy to scan a roll and find the winners.
Is that correct?
I live in NC and have yet to play the lottery.
This would seem to be impossible, but have mathematicians figured out how likely it is that there has been cheating or some other integrity problem (like a supposed random winning number generator which isn’t)?
Lots of poorly supervised money always draws the scammers. Grant money, public aid, foreign aid, tithes at megachurches, state lotteries or what have you, it’s all just a trough to feed at for some.
I think the easy way to do this is when an illiterate person comes in with a winning lottery ticket is for the clerk to agree... “Wow! You just won a $1000!” Pay him a grand from the till and then claim the $10,000 or $100,000 ticket for yourself. This would only work on illiterate gamblers I would think... but it might even be tried on others. The worse that could happen is the victim merely says: “No... that’s doesn’t say $1000... it says $10,000.” The clerk looks closer and says “Golly Gee! You’re right! This glare is terrible. Let me get you the paper work to claim your winnings.”
This can be explained so simply it’s not even a scam:
the store owners are just thinking logically:
they know (they must) that every new supply of tickets they get have a certain amount of winners, big and small.
So as not to attract attention, they must continually sell
SOME tickets to regular lotto playing customers. But here’s how they do it: unlike the usual lotto degenerate who comes in with their daily or weekly 5,10,20 dollar purchase, the store owner just scratches off ticket after ticket until they have a winner. Say they scratch off 20 tickets, and finally hit a $100 winner. THey pocket $80 and put $20 in the till. They don’t have to make an upfront investment like most players, who have a set limit in mind: they simply play for free until they win.Inevitably they are going to hit bigger jackpots, which of course will pay for all those losing lotto tickets. And even if they WERE paying, the thing would work out the same way: what difference would it make if they took $50 out of the cash register, and set it aside
“in escrow” until they won $100. The only way to stop this would be for lottery officials to demand that , say, 95% of the tickets be sold to the public, on a first come, first served basis. But that’s the prerogative the storeowner thinks is his own.BTW, this would ONLY work with scratch off tickets, regular pick 5 or pick 6 lottery numbers games, like state lotteries, are a much different animal, impossible to defeat without obviously larcenous
insider information, or a confederate inside the room where the numbers are spit out.
Most likely, what you have is a retailer who sells lottery tickets to people who can’t legally claim the major prizes, such as illegal immigrants. (C’mon, this is FR... no one has made this an anti-illegal0immigrant thread yet?)
So, when one of them hits a big prize, they go back to the store, where the boss or an employee working there pays them a certain amount and then cashes the ticket themselves.
Essentially, a money-laundering scheme.
Don't ever buy a scratch off ticket, period. It has already been scanned.
Some retailers likely buy a lot of tickets. It’s like being stuck in a casino all day, every day.
I notice that everybody's a suspect. Don't win a scratch off too often, you might be cheating. Better to donate your winnings back to the state.
If you play, check your own tickets.
They ask you what you’re going to do with the money.”
Pay for the hundreds of scratch offs you haven’t paid for yet.
You can tell a customer that their ticket is not a winner, and if they’re semiliterate you may get away with it. There are some crooks in the retail business who may be doing this.
The cheating occurred when the bar employees knew that say $500.00 of winning was still in the tip jar but that the entire jar could be bought for say $200.00. The employees kept count of the payoffs and occasionally there would be few payoffs and say over half the tickets were sold. They knew the appropriate time to buy the remaining tickets in the jar.
I talked to an Indian storekeeper in NYC who claims that he knows fellow storekeepers who scan whole rolls of scratch-off tickets using a simple computer scanner set to a certain level.
According to him they are able to pick about 20 winners a week this way.
Whether he was yanking my Obama I couldn’t tell but it was a good story.
What are the odds?
If this is what it takes to kill off lotteries, so be it.
These states, like NY and NC, that try to cover up the fraud are destroying the lotteries for the honest states. It’s all good in the end, but I would be livid if I were running California’s lottery.
I used to get upset when I saw a welfare mom take her change from a pack of cigarettes in lottery tickets then I realized that it was one way to get the money back into the general funds with a small percentage going to the collection agent.
Sign the the back of your winning lotto or mega or powerball tickets. There is a line for it. Otherwise it is a bearer certificate
Hand the clerk a ticket and say, “is this a winner?” And the clerk says, “No, sorry - I’ll toss that for you”....
I suspect people who don't understand 14 million to one odds are bad - might be easy to trick.