BC - Lottery customers need proof that its only the luck of the draw for ticket sellers
Vancouver Sun, Thursday, December 14, 2006
It turns out that the folks who sell lottery tickets in B.C. are a pretty lucky lot. Over the past six years, about one in 25 prizes worth more than $10,000 was won by a ticket retailer, according internal B.C. Lottery Corp. documents obtained by Vancouver Sun reporter Chad Skelton.
As a portion of the adult population, about one in 140 British Columbians sells lottery tickets in retail outlets, so those people are almost six times as likely as anyone else to win a major prize.
We don’t know how lucky they are when it comes to prizes under $10,000, because the BCLC does not keep track of whether insiders win those.
In fact, the BCLC seems remarkably unconcerned about the whole issue regarding the potential theft of tickets by retailers.
When first questioned about the issue six weeks ago, a spokesman for the BCLC said there had only been one incident of theft by a retailer. Now the corporation admits there have been four, all the result of customer complaints.
What happens if customers don’t know they have been swindled?
The BCLC says it has internal mechanisms to prevent fraud. But what are the odds that the only four cases of theft committed by retailers have been noticed by customers?
Paul Smith, the spokesman for the BCLC, says “the easy conclusion” about the apparent good luck of lottery ticket sellers is that they buy more tickets than most people do, so they win more.
Easy, yes. Convincing, no — especially when the attitude of BCLC officials seems to be that if they don’t look, they won’t find anything bad.
The lottery business is based on trust. People buying tickets have to believe their chance of winning is as good as anyone else’s, and with a little luck, better.
By failing to take this issue seriously, the BCLC risks losing the trust it needs from British Columbians to achieve the $1 billion in sales it is hoping for this year.
It’s a good bet that once the trust is gone, it will take more than empty assurances to get it back.
© The Vancouver Sun 2006
© 2006 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications Inc.
