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Scams and frauds

Lotteries, like any form of gambling, are susceptible to fraud, despite the high degree of scrutiny claimed by the organizers. Numerous lottery scams exist.

Some advance fee fraud scams on the Internet are based on lotteries. The fraud starts with spam congratulating the recipient on their recent lottery win. The email explains that in order to release funds the email recipient must part with a certain amount (as tax/fees) as per the rules or risk forfeiture.

Another form of scam involves the selling of "systems" which purport to improve a player's chances of selecting the winning numbers in a Lotto game. These scams are generally based on the buyer's (and perhaps the seller's) misunderstanding of probability and random numbers. Sale of these systems or software is legal, however, since they mention that the product cannot guarantee a win, let alone a jackpot.

There have also been several cases of cashiers at lottery retailers who have attempted to scam customers out of their winnings. Some locations require the patron to hand the lottery ticket to the cashier to determine how much they have won, or if they have won at all, the cashier then scans the ticket to determine one or both. In cases where there is no visible or audible cue to the patron of the outcome of the scan some cashiers have taken the opportunity to claim that the ticket is a loser or that it is worth far less than it is and offer to "throw it away" or surreptitiously substitute it for another ticket. The cashier then pockets the ticket and eventually claims it as their own.

The BBC TV series The Real Hustle showed a variation of the lottery scam in which a group of scammers pretended to have won a lottery, but was prevented from claiming the prize as the person who wrote the name on the back of the ticket was supposedly out of the country on that date. They were able to persuade a stranger to put up money as collateral in order to share in the prize pool.

On some occasions, the actual lottery draw itself has been compromised by fraudsters. The 1980 Pennsylvania Lottery scandal involved weighting balls in The Daily Number. In the Hot Lotto fraud scandal software code was added to the Hot Lotto random number generator allowing a fraudster to predict winning numbers on specific days of the year.

In 2003, Mohan Srivastava, a Canadian geological statistician, found non-random patterns in "Tic-Tac-Toe" tickets sold by the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation. "Tic-Tac-Toe" was pulled off the shelves, and became the first game ever recalled by the OLG.