Have you ever had a questionable experience at the ticket-checking machine?
Have you ever discarded a winning scratcher unintentionally, or suspect this has ever happened to you?
Or do you feel like there was ever the opportunity for a dishonest clerk to pull a fast one on you?
[Me]: I have witnessed a ticket-checker display that a non-winning scratcher had a prize on it while I was scanning multiple scratchers. The machine gave me the indication it had acknowledged the new bar code I was presenting to it by beeping and refreshing it's screen, but hadn't truly refreshed and continued displaying the previous ticket's results.
I can't confirm though, whether a self-checking machine has ever indicated a winner was a non-winner, but has told me a non-winner was a winner, mistakenly. (Which is safer than assuming you lost when you didn't. I would rather have my hopes crushed than be scrapping winning tickets).
In response to the second question I have asked everyone, there was this scratcher called Fantastic 5's ($5) that had a roulette style puzzle as part of a series of games on the card, and I foolishly assumed that if the first two symbols didn't match in the same column then it was impossible to win since you had to match all three. So I didn't always scratch the area off completely. But you could still find automatic symbols, I later learned, so that could have cost me.
California only implemented greater security precautions against pinning 2 years ago (January 2015). Up until that point a retailer only had to scan the back of a scratcher if they had the 3-digit PSN (which is under the latex, but could be passed off since the numerals are quite small).