I occasionally see news stories of a robbery or burglary where the perpetrator cops some scratch tickets along with the other stuff.
with the lottery folks simply be able to void that batch of tickets? or, even more, use those tickets to catch him if he tries to cash in?
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I don’t see why not. Each one has a unique serial number, and they would track which ones went to which stores.
I doubt it’s worth the hassle if they stole a few tickets, but if there was a major theft or a murder then definitely.
Ya, but would you need to know the serial number yourself? How would you help them to know what specific tickets were stolen?
I guess you could have every store selling them be required to register the sale mapped to the serial number, and disqualify any unregistered ticket. It’d be a bit of a hassle, but certainly doable.
I’m just guessing, but they would know the serial numbers that got stolen. Let’s say 1230001-1231000. Out of those 1000 tickets, the company that makes the tickets, could look up what the big winners were. If there was something like win $10,000 then that would be easier to flag, because they don’t get cashed out at the gas station. If there was small winnings like $5-$10, I could see the scratcher company just writing those losses off.
They can absolutely turn them off. If they can determine the range that was stolen then the validator will just refuse to pay out when the ticket is claimed.
there goes my retirement plan.
As somebody who works with lottery daily, yes. As soon as it is reported as stolen (all vendors [really should] keep strict inventories on their lottery and basically treat it as they would cash), all stolen tickets will be invalidated and they will notnbe redeamable.
if somebody rips off a partial roll, can you tell exactly where the bad tickets begin?
Yes. They all have serial numbers, likely sequential so if a roll has serials 0005 through 00150 and some are stolen it should be very easy to tell. If the inventory records show 5 sales and only 00142 through 00150 are remaining, all cards from 00011 to 00141 can be safely assumed stolen and invalidated.
Aren’t scratch tickets activated in the lottery system at the moment of purchase anyway? They have serial numbers
No
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that’s a good question
One of the first jobs I had out of high-school was working at a gas station and we sold scratch-offs and I don’t recall that we kept track of the tickets at all.
