5 high-profile lottery scandals

All over the world there are regular lotteries of all kinds. In the USA alone, the market has a turnover of more than 60 billion dollars. Of course, the big money attracts cheaters, which leads to high-profile scandals. One should therefore only choose a well-established online casino where the lottery is fair game.

The winning combination

The scandal took place in the state of Pennsylvania. The lottery host and his accomplices managed to sneak into the room with the balls and poured paint into all but 4 and 6 with a syringe. This made them heavier and the cheaters placed large bets on possible combinations of the two numbers.
Because of the paint, all the other balls in the draw hardly rose, and only 4 and 6 made it to the exit of the lotto machine. The fraud was uncovered and the presenter and the lottery representative went to court.

Blindfolded children

In the 1990s, the Milan Lotto draw was conducted with blindfolded children. It was agreed with them to pull out only certain numbers. And so that they could be distinguished, the balls were heated or frozen.
The scam lasted for five years. During that time, the scammers made over $170 million. A serious scandal erupted and people demanded that people be removed from the raffle machines. However, the organisers did not change anything and the incident was gradually forgotten. Meanwhile, the lottery machines gradually lost their popularity.
Win in five minutes
In 2006 Zhao Licun from China noticed that tickets could be bought from a cash register within 5 minutes after the announcement of the winning numbers. As he worked as a manager of lottery shops, he had no trouble pulling off the scam. Although Zhao did not receive the winnings himself, the fraud was discovered. Lijun lost all his assets and received a life sentence.

A cunning security guard

The main character of this scandal was the deputy security director of an American lottery. Despite his position, he acted quite recklessly. The fact is that the company gave away free tickets to employees, which they were supposed to distribute to shops and retail outlets.
But Remmele Maziq decided to do things differently. All the tickets were scratch cards. Maziq would simply erase it. And if the ticket was a loser, he threw it away. Winning ones, he cashed them in. At the same time, the security guard only cashed in tickets worth up to $500, so as not to apply for the winnings in person.
As a result, the scam was exposed and the court ordered Remmele to return nearly $500,000 to the company and sentenced him to a prison term of 37 months. The scammer’s lawyers tried to prove that he did not receive all the winnings from these tickets, but the punishment remained unchanged.

Victory at Stoloto

In 2020, a scandal also took place in Russia. The January draw of Stoloto ended in a serious dispute. In this draw, for the first time in the history of the lottery, a record prize of 1 billion rubles was drawn. Nadezhda Bartosh, a resident of Moscow suburbs, was able to win it.
Some rejoiced for the winning pensioner, but there were those who regarded the whole story with suspicion. They began to study the woman’s biography and found many interesting details of her life.
It turned out that the pensioner was a wealthy person. On top of that, she has family ties to a former lottery founder. However, the “investigation” took place only in social networks and no official evidence was presented. The founders of Stoloto themselves stated that there were no violations, and the draw took place without breaking the law.