Lottery - Scams and frauds
Thursday, August 21st, 2008Lottery, like any form of gambling, is susceptible to fraud, despite the high degree of scrutiny claimed by the organizers. One method involved is to tamper with the machine used for the number selection. By rigging a machine, it is theoretically easy to win a lottery. This act is often done in connivance with an employee of the lottery firm. Methods used vary; loaded balls where select balls are made to pop-up making it either lighter or heavier than the rest. All balls should be independently verified for materials, size, pressure, susceptibility to magnetism, and other qualities.
The most infamous case of insider lottery fraud was in Maryland in 1979. The Maryland lottery determined its winner by an air blower, where three numbers would bubble up. By injecting fluid into every ball except those numbered 4 and 6, and then buying tickets with every combination of 4 and 6, lottery personnel guaranteed themselves big winnings. There was immediate suspicion that the game had been rigged and the balls were removed for examination. The announcer was arrested and confessed two days later.
In some US States, such as Kansas and Minnesota, losing lottery tickets can be mailed in for a raffle of special prizes. The trouble with that is that employees of stores that sell lottery tickets sometimes collect the lottery tickets that are thrown away and send them in. As a lottery official put it “The retailers have an unlimited supply of free tickets. You do not need to be an FBI agent to realize that is a tremendously unfair advantage.” [5]
Some advance fee fraud scams on the Internet are based on lotteries. The fraud starts with spam congratulating the recipient on their recent lottery win. The email explains that in order to release funds the email recipient must part with a certain amount (as tax/fees) as per the rules or risk forfeiture.
Another form of lottery scam involves the selling of “systems” which purport to improve a player’s chances of selecting the winning numbers in a Lotto game. These scams are generally based on the buyer’s (and perhaps the seller’s) misunderstanding of probability and random numbers. Sale of these systems or software is legal, however, since they mention that the product cannot guarantee a win, let alone a jackpot.
