Friday, January 05, 2007

Scratch And Lose

The Hoosier Lottery has promoted its scratch-off tickets as "Scratch and Win", but a class action lawsuit filed this past week against it makes it look more like "Scratch and Lose." According to a lawsuit filed by attorney Rich Waples, the Hoosier Lottery promoted a scratch-off ticket last year called Cash Blast which promised $8 million in cash prizes, but in actuality it paid out less than $1 million. One Carmel resident, Jeff Frazer, laid out $40,000 at $10 per ticket when the game was about to wrap up because most of the prizes were yet to be won. "As the game wrapped up, the last 10 to 20 percent of the tickets being left, virtually all the prizes were still available," Frazer told WTHR. "And that's where a gamble becomes an investment. When you know every couple of tickets are going to be a nice winner, that's when you play hard," said Frazer.

Waples' lawsuit claims the originally advertised $8 million in prizes never existed. The WTHR report notes that the Hoosier Lottery put out a press release last year saying it had to recall 2.5 million lottery tickets because of a problem it had with its printing company. The Hoosier Lottery claimed, however, the reprinted tickets did not impact the odds of the game. Waples' lawsuit seeks $20 million in damages--the amount he claims was spent on non-winning Cash Blast tickets during the period in question. If you purchased a Cash Blast ticket between May 2005 and July 7, 2006, you are urged to contact Waples to become a part of the class action lawsuit. WTHR reports that an opportunity was afforded to the Hoosier Lottery to refund the money to the lottery ticket purchasers, but it refused.

3 comments:

Wilson46201 said...

Aren't the lottery games supposed to pay out in prizes 50% of the cost of the tickets by law? Or is that 50% prize payout supposed to reflect the total annual lottery sales?

At those odds, you'll notice the Lilly Foundation and Beurt SerVaas dont have major portfolios purchasing lottery tickets...

Anonymous said...

This guy freely admits spending $40,000 on lotto tickets? Wow. At least the state got its money's worth on the stupidty tax here.

Anonymous said...

"This guy freely admits spending $40,000 on lotto tickets? Wow. At least the state got its money's worth on the stupidty tax here."

Actually, that was a no brainer for the most part: Cash Blast which promised $8 million in cash prizes, but in actuality it paid out less than $1 million. One Carmel resident, Jeff Frazer, laid out $40,000 at $10 per ticket when the game was about to wrap up because most of the prizes were yet to be won.

I see three flaws in this type of investment: #1: People purchase a ticket, win, but don't think they won and throw the ticket away. #2: People purchase and lose a ticket. #3: A large number of people were holding onto nearly $8,000,000.00 in winning tickets and for whatever reason(s), had not yet cashed them in.

None of these three things are likely considering that around $7M had went unpaid. Especially when almost all the big winners were said to be still available. While the guys odds of winning may not have changed (actually, if he knew most of the tickets were gone _and_ a large amount of prize money was still available, the odds should have been in his favor), his possible winnings were actually 1/8th of what was stated by the lottery. As long as this guy can prove he spent this money, the lottery should be made to pay. It is wrong that the lottery can promise the possibility to win the golden egg, then turn around can say "Oh wait, it is actually a lead egg."