Biggest Lottery Scandals In The World

The lottery is a gamble trough and trough. From the way, you select the numbers on your slip to the draw. Imagine the happiness after someone wins the jackpot! It is a blessing! Or not? There have been examples of cheating and scandals on the lottery market several times, which raised some questions. Is it manipulated? Why does winning the lottery ruin a person’s life, etc.? We are going to show you the biggest lottery scandals in the world!

Biggest Lottery Scandals In The World

The Cuban lottery scandal happened in 1914. Some people sold fake Cuban lottery tickets in some American states, especially Florida, which grew into such a scandal that even the government of Cuba had to intervene! The perpetrators, who worked in the lottery, printed large amounts of the fake slips three times a month. According to the news, the offenders ran a private lottery in the neighboring island countries. They paid based on the Cuban prizes but far less. For example, the jackpot was $ 30,000 instead of $ 100,000. They pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, which shows that the house always wins. These kinds of scams were hard to trace at the beginning of the 20th century, so probably many got away with similar crimes.

One of the biggest lottery scandals in the world was the 666 scam in 1980. In Pennsylvania, the court sentenced many people due to a TV lottery game. The bettors had to pick three numbers, but the organizers manipulated the weight of the table tennis balls they used at the draw. So that the system picked out the fourth and sixth balls as winners, and the cheaters played with their combinations. Then in 1980, the triple-six variation was drawn. They should have taken it as a sign. The trick could have worked, but the numbers and a record $ 3.2 million jackpot caught the authorities’ attention. They arrested the cheaters, and those who took part in the scheme and won never received the winning.

A group of people used the loopholes in a game called Virginia Lottery in 1992 in Australia. The jackpot was $ 27 million, and the game had seven million number combinations. To pull it off, a group of investors bought five million tickets, each for a dollar, and won the grand prize. The organizers were spitting mad but paid out the winning as the group did not break the rules. However, they then changed the system, limiting the number of tickets a player could buy and the number of tickets a lottery can sell. They even regulated the slips that bettors had to pick the numbers themselves. As you can see, finding loopholes is not a crime, so you can search for them yourself at theLotter, for instance.

You Would Have Never Guessed

In Italy, a lottery scandal took place in several big cities in 1999, which was followed by police investigations and a series of arrests of the entire lottery. Blindfolded children performed the draw, so no one suspected anything. However, they slipped new, smoother balls between the old, scratched ones, which was not noticeable from afar. They taught the children how to choose the numbers by touch. According to another source, the polish was, and gloss was recognizable, and at times they either froze or heated the balls so the kids could distinguish. The kids got money and toys in return. The fraud lasted for at least four years until one of the cheaters’ wives exposed them.

In China, a lottery vendor who discovered an error in a lotto game’s software, according to online lottery sites in China, has received unusually severe punishment. He got a life sentence even though it was not the biggest lottery scandal in the world. This loophole allowed him to add a ticket to the system five minutes after the draw. He earned nearly four million dollars with it but was caught and arrested. His downfall may have been to involve friends and neighbors in the fraud as well, or maybe he should not have played the jackpot three times in a row.

In the US, the lotto system often requires lottery players to take their tickets back to where they purchased them to find out if they have won, such as at a gas station or convenience store. In such cases, several times, the seller said that they did not win or quickly switched out the tickets. The latter happened at Niagara in the US with seven construction workers, and an older lady, in Ontario, Canada. In both cases, many millions of dollars were at stake. The Police investigated, and the original ticket owners eventually got the winnings after many years of lawsuits. Sadly, the old lady could not receive it since she died before they announced the verdict.

Biggest Lottery Scandals in The World

In 2012, the case of a lottery theft of two brothers became forfeited. The brothers were working in a store in New York in 2006 when someone brought in a winning lottery ticket of $ 5 million. The brothers told him that he won five thousand dollars, gave him four thousand as winning, and took a thousand as a commission. Then they waited more than five years until, in 2012, they asked for the money. Although the judge determined that the statute of limitations had expired, it was still not clear whether the crime did not take place in 2012 and whether the law could be abused in this way. 

A group of science students and programmers seized an opportunity and outsmarted one of the lottery games in Massachusetts, resulting in one of the biggest lottery scandals in the world. They found a loophole in the system of the game that promised them a more secure chance to win the more tickets they filled out in 2011. Their method proved legal, very similar to the Australian case mentioned above. They went for sure and spent more than half a million dollars filling out 300,000 lotto tickets. They won nearly a million dollars, winning between $ 800,000 and $ 24,000 each. If you are interested, check out their whole story in our article about students who beat the house!

We also consider it lottery abuse if someone sells winning number combinations that increase the chances of winning. It’s not surprising since all numbers have an equal opportunity in the lottery draw. No combination has a better chance. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 have the same odds as 11, 22, 33, 55, 44. Mathematically, it doesn’t matter what we play. Vendors of winning combinations take advantage of the fact that most people have no idea about probability and random number generation. The sale of such combinations is also prohibited in many countries. There are tips for having better chances at winning the online lottery and the traditional, but you can’t buy those.

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