In Canada, are you able to say, "I don't want this one" until you get a potential winner? Here in Texas, you cannot pick your ticket. When you buy a ticket, you get whatever the cashier gives you or whatever the machine spits out. Or is the guy simply not wasting time scratching off the losers? I still don't see how this could be profitable since most games have 1:5 odds, including break even prizes.
“Lots of people buy lottery tickets in bulk to give away as prizes for contests,” he says. He asked several Toronto retailers if they would object to him buying tickets and then exchanging the unused, unscratched tickets. “Everybody said that would be totally fine. Nobody was even a tiny bit suspicious,” he says. “Why not? Because they all assumed the games are unbreakable. So what I would try to do is buy up lots of tickets, run them through my scanning machine, and then try to return the unscratched losers. Of course, you could also just find a retailer willing to cooperate or take a bribe. That might be easier.”
Not in the UK lottery; all the tickets get dispensed from clear containers and have to be the next one on the roll (which comes out at the back so you can't see what the next one will be). They've tried educating their customers* about not buying tickets that aren't on the roll.
This to me seemed to be the core of the problem; not that the cards were crackable, but that it was possible for a user to select what card to purchase rather than just what game to play. Remove that and the problem largely goes away through simple education about valid play procedures as I suggested.
Exactly. Force players to buy the next ticket on the roll (without seeing it) and don't allow unused tickets to be returned. Problem solved.
I grew up in Maine and tickets are dispensed this way. Not sure about returning tickets, but knowing Mainers, I'd be surprised if they would take them back. It doesn't pass the straight-face test.
Problem not solved. A savvy attendant just checks the tickets on the end of each roll. If it's a winner, go ahead and buy it. Otherwise, wait until a customer buys the loser first.
I once bought a brick of scratch tickets, the only way I see this working is buying the brick, going through them and pulling out the winners and then selling the unscratched ones back to your friend convenience store clerk. There should be lots of tickets still attached to eachother, so they can be placed back into the hopper and removed as usual. When a "broken link" is encountered, it'll just look like the end of a brick.
It would not work, except that some lotteries have been trying to get creative with marketing. They want to give people an illusion of control, hence letting them choose between several "different" tickets. This is the "baited hook" they mention.
In theory, the tickets are not actually visibly different. In practice, apparently they are, just not in entirely obvious ways.
