Thought I'd post what I saw the other day. It shocked me, but in light of recent events it made things all to clear.
First off I would like to say that I am new to this forum and I have not searched it yet, so if this topic has already been covered... well sorry.
Anyway, I live in Ontario Canada and in the last few months our provincial Lottery Corporation has been under fire for the disproportionate amount of lotto agents (the store clerk) who have won big awards from scratch ticket games. The story broke on an investigative journailism show on our national TV network, the CBC. It was thought that some of the lotto agents were falsly telling persons that their tickets were losers when they came to the store to have their tickets validated.
But the above explaination seemed unrealisitc to me, after all, scratch tickets are pretty straight forward, persons who play pretty much know if their ticket is a winner or not. I think most people don't take their loser scratch tickets to the store to be checked. So if you were told that you had a loser even though you knew it had won you'd raise hell in the store. So, while I am sure that in some cases the bait and switch method of theft took place, it seems like it is unlikely to be the reason for the disproportionate amount of agent wins. But, like most I just excepted the explaination and thought to myself "those idiots, I wouldn't let anyone scame me like that". Untill a few days ago.
I was at a local store -that I had long given up on to buy scratch tickets because it was unlucky, never so much as winning the value of the ticket - to use the satlite post office within it. It was a slow afternoon and other then the cashier in front and the postal agent at the back I was the only person in the store. After I conducted my business, I went outside and happened to look through the front window of the store and saw the cashier taking lotto scratch tickets from the display case that sits ontop the counter and she began to scan them into the lotto terminal then she replaced them back into the display case. I didn't know what to make of it a first, the trusting person in me wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. I thought that maybe new security protocols called for the agent to scan a new scratch ticket into the system to tell the Lotto Corp that it is available for sale. So I asked an agent at another local store if that was the case and he said that he had never heard of that before.
Now I think that what the lotto agent was doing was scanning all the scratch tickets she was selling keeping back the winners for herself, and putting the losers out for sale. The scam is almost perfect, I mean who electronically checks losing scratch tickets? People just throw away losers, so the risk of anyone finding out that their losing ticket had already been validated is slim. Now this is just my opinion but I think this practise is widespread. This might explain the disproportionate amount of lotto agent wins. I fthis is the case I would like the Lotto Corp to place a layer of wax over the serial number just like the game board, so that if the serial is exposed we could decline buying the ticket.
Any how, anyone else seen or heard of this before?