I have to admit to buying my share of lottery scratch-off tickets. I like the ones that offer $50,000-$100,000 as sometimes they sell for just one or two dollars and I will know instantly if I am a big winner – no joy yet, but if I keep buying them I have a chance.
WRONG! Seems like some professor at Washington and Lee University had a penchant for purchasing the scratch-offs. He watched the lottery statistics on-line and if all the grand prizes had not been awarded yet, he was motivated to buy a few. Well, he bought some tickets and then discovered that the top prizes had already been awarded and his chance of becoming a big winner was zero.
In Virginia and I suspect in other states too, they promise to remove the scratch-off tickets from the retail stores when all the grand prize tickets have been claimed. The probably just forgot.
The professor did a little more research and discovered that they forgot a lot. In fact since 2003 the lottery had sold over $84 million worth of tickets when the purchaser had no chance of winning the big prize.
I was thinking that if this was not the state doing this, that someone would go to jail. I guess it's okay though – the money goes for a good cause. So you are enticed to buy a ticket and get rich instantly and the state forgets (they wouldn't do it on purpose would they?) to tell you that you have no chance – oh well.
The folks that have plenty of money never buy the tickets and the folks like me hoping for some miracle of good luck waste our money in the futile hope that fortune will visit us. You can be pretty well be guaranteed that it will not happen in Virgina. Of course those other states are probably more honest – RIGHT!
The story is here.
