Lotto Sales People Win More Than Average Joes; What Are The Odds?
October 30th, 2006 | by MadHacktress |One in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, according to one professor at the University of Toronto. That is not a small number.
214 lotto “insiders” - people who work as vendors in locations which sell the tickets - have won prizes in excess of 50Gs since 1999. Two thirds of these claims, more than 140, likely involved some level of deception of the rightful ticket owner.
The Fifth Estate, a CBC news program, investigated the issue and reports that this is probably much more epidemic than we know. They claim it is likely an issues across the United States and Canada.
They claim that the elderly are especially vulnerable to being defrauded and profiled a now 82-year old who was rooked out of 250,000$ worth of his winnings. He recently received a settlement of 202,000$ (I don’t know how that works, exactly) from the lottery corporation as compensation for the fraud.
In the wake of The Fifth Estate’s broadcast, the Ontario Ombudsman announced that an investigation of the allegations will be conducted. This is hoped to restore the public’s faith in the province’s lottery corporation.
The odds of winning the lottery are already too slim to risk losing your winnings to scumbag insiders. Lottery corporations are looking in to technology that would allow ticketholders to check their tickets by themselves.
Entry Filed under: In The News
I watched that Fifth Estate show. It was crazy what the 82 y/o guy had to do to just be heard! It is nuts that the Ontario Government would treat someone with such a lack of respect! They did not even really investigate his claim! I sure hope he got a nice BIG settlement out of them!