I'm a new member from Pennsylvania - don't even have any clever end quote yet - and I'm wondering about something in regard to instant scratch off games. Perhaps someone can help?
Let's take a $10 game that has 8 top prizes of $250,000. I'm assuming whatever company creates these for the states runs off the entire lot of tickets at once, somehow sprinkling in the top prizes along the way (exactly how they do that is also a bit of a mystery to me).
Does someone decide how the big prize tickets are going to be distributed? Pa. is a big state, with 9 million people. Does someone say, OK, we'll send one jackpot ticket to the Philadelphia area, another to Pittsburgh and so on, or is the distribution random, meaning a town of 12,000 could theoretically get ALL of the jackpot tickets?
Along these same lines, how does the state ensure that no one can find out where the jackpot tickets have gone? If, for example, I knew there was one in a town with three outlets, I could marketedly improve my chances of winning, needless to say. How do they make sure that no one can find out when the jackpot tickets were printed and where they went?
I'm not saying there is - or is not - fraud, just that I'm very curious about exactly what techniques are used to make sure fraud doesn't occur. We are talking about large sums of money here. I apologize if this is all common knowledge, but I've hunted around a bit and have yet to find a discussion of these matters.
So, if you have insight, please share. Thanks.