used to work overnights at a gas station as well. it's really ****ed up how the same woman can come in every night and blow $100 on those little tear-off ones with the 3 lemons and ****, and even if she doubles the $100 she just spends the whole $200 on more tickets until it's gone.

yeah, this + 1000

I remember my uncle won $2000 from buying $20 worth of scratchers.

He kept rolling that money into scratcher tickets and he was all like, "I started with $20 and made $2000, so if I played $200/day I should be able to make at least $400 a day ($200 profit) which is a lot less than the $2k I made..."

No matter how hard I tried to dissuade him, he wouldn't listen.

That $2000 lasted him about a month, playing between $100 and $200 per day. By the end of it, he had sunk another $400 into buying scratchers...

In the past I have purchased books of tickets $5 .. 60 tickets per book ($300). You can always count on getting back about $165 if you do not hit a big winner (Colorado). The largest guarenteed winner in the pack was $50. If I were to buy $300 worth again at one time, I would buy go to 10 stores and buy 6 tickets at each. Then you have a better chance at hitting more than 1 $50 winner.
I did win $5000 once when I bought 1 $3 ticket.....

You also have a better chance at hitting less than 1 $50 winner.

This gambling thing is harder than it seems.

Ehh, he's doing it right. If buying b the box you have less variance, then it's the same EV but more entertaining to buy from different boxes.

Yup

yeah i saw a woman do this once when i was on vacation and i was a little kid...the max prize was only a few hundred and she bought like hundreds of tickets. It made a lasting impression.

Thought this might be of interest to some people. Guy basically figured out on certain tickets, without scratching how to predict winners with pretty good accuracy.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/01/ff_lottery/all/1

I think that hardest thing to do if you did crack these tickets would be how to only buy the winning tickets. He suggests buying a large amount and then trying to return the losing unscratched ones, can't imagine that would be as easy as it sounds.

While this story was written last year, Srivastava discovered how to determine winners back in 2003. His revealings of his findings caused some of the games to get pulled. What surprised me most about the article (had read it a while back) was this:

“Lots of people buy lottery tickets in bulk to give away as prizes for contests,” he says. He asked several Toronto retailers if they would object to him buying tickets and then exchanging the unused, unscratched tickets. “Everybody said that would be totally fine. Nobody was even a tiny bit suspicious,” he says. “Why not? Because they all assumed the games are unbreakable. So what I would try to do is buy up lots of tickets, run them through my scanning machine, and then try to return the unscratched losers. Of course, you could also just find a retailer willing to cooperate or take a bribe. That might be easier.” The scam would involve getting access to opened but unsold books of tickets. A potential plunderer would need to sort through these tickets and selectively pick the winners. The losers would be sold to unwitting customers—or returned to the lottery after the game was taken off the market.

The following was also interesting:

Consider a series of reports by the Massachusetts state auditor. The reports describe a long list of troubling findings, such as the fact that one person cashed in 1,588 winning tickets between 2002 and 2004 for a grand total of $2.84 million.

A 1999 audit found that another person cashed in 149 tickets worth $237,000, while the top 10 multiple-prize winners had won 842 times for a total of $1.8 million

But the above makes sense by this statement:

The auditor attributed the high number of payouts going to single individuals to professional cashers. These cashers turn in others’ winning tickets—they are paid a small percentage—so the real winners can avoid taxes. But if those cashers were getting prepicked winners, that could be hard to uncover.

Another interesting aspect of lotteries:

Furthermore, the Massachusetts lottery has a history of dispensing large payouts to suspected criminals, at least in one Mass Millions game. In 1991, James “Whitey” Bulger, a notorious South Boston mob boss currently on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list—he’s thought to be the inspiration for the Frank Costello character in The Departed—and three others cashed in a winning lottery ticket worth $14.3 million. He collected more than $350,000 before his indictment.

At the time, authorities thought Bulger was using the lottery to launder money: take illicit profits, buy a share in a winning lottery ticket, redeem it, and end up with clean cash. In this respect, the lottery system seems purpose-built for organized crime, says Michael Plichta, unit chief of the FBI’s organized crime section. “When I was working in Puerto Rico, I watched all these criminals use traditional lottery games to clean their money,” he remembers. “You’d bring these drug guys in, and you’d ask them where their income came from, how they could afford their mansion even though they didn’t have a job, and they’d produce all these winning lottery tickets. That’s when I began to realize that they were using the games to launder cash.”

This probably surprised me the most though:

And then there’s Joan Ginther, who has won more than $1 million from the Texas Lottery on four different occasions. She bought two of the winners from the same store in Bishop, Texas. What’s strangest of all, perhaps, is that three of Ginther’s wins came from scratch tickets with baited hooks and not from Mega Millions or Powerball. Last June, Ginther won $10 million from a $50 ticket, which is the largest scratch prize ever awarded by the Texas Lottery.

Very interesting article indeed but don't think it'd be worth doing what the statistician did. Tried looking up online if retailers here in the US would take back unscratched tickets and from what I could see is that they wouldn't. Maybe there are some more shady gas stations/convenience stores that would, or you could find some employees at these places and bribe them or work together with them to get only the winning tickets.

This is a case that stumps me. I realize it's possible, but this case not resulting in somebody being prosecuted leads me to believe there has been no serious investigation.

Indeed. Remember reading something about someone else who cashed in large amounts that were suspiciously large and frequently and think they had some ties to the lottery. Haven't been able to find it again though.

Yet the case of Joan Ginther is quite improbable if she didn't have some sort of inside connection.

While not the same, reminds me of a Saved By The Bell episode. They scheme up running a raffle with a prize of a vacation to Hawaii (?) to the winner but rig it so Screech "wins' the prize, which was non-existent to begin with.

Is it that far fetched to think some lotteries could be doing the same thing? The fact that Joan Ginther refused much publicity and the lack of an investigation makes it smell fishy. I thought with winning big prizes like that at a casino or in a lottery comes with allowing publicity of your winnings. Don't know what kind of independent vetting is involved with state run lotteries, but I'd imagine such a statistical anomaly like that of Ginther's would've led to an independent investigation.

There's no incentive to police parimutuel games unless the publicity brings the honesty of the game into question -- it stuns me that this series of incidents didn't generate that publicity. As I recall, she was a math specialist of some sort, which made it a lot more suspicious in my opinion -- a logical person is much more likely to have discovered an exploit than to have spent a fortune on scratch tickets.

What kind of scanner do I need to get? If you had one, I bet you could make a decent amount of money off of selling the losers to other people at a discount.

No exact proof, but unverifiable sources (wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lottery ) and a few others point to her having cracked the distribution algorithm.
" It was speculated that there was actually a pattern to where and when the winning tickets were sold, and that Professor Ginther had figured out this pattern"
She also seemed to be requesting stores buy certain types of big ticket cards etc.

It of course would not be impossible for someone to win that many big jackpots that many times buying large numbers of tickets(she bought something like 3000+ a year), but they estimate the odds to be:
"The fourth time she won the lottery, AP wrote that her chance was 1 in 18 septimillion, which 1 in 18,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (24 zeros in front of 18)."

I'm not sure exactly what, but it seems like she figured something out. She has never done any public interviews or anything(i wouldn't either if i figured something out).
She now lives in vegas....