Ontario Lottery officers labelled intimidating
19/07/2008 15:20:52
Ontario Lottery officers have been branded “heavy handed and intimidating” but shop owners after they have been trying to crack down on shopkeepers who are cheating lottery winners out of their winnings. According to the London Free Press where I read this story Ontario Lottery officers have even resorted to going through dustbins and behind the counter rubbish bins in order to try and weed out fraudulent store owners.
I’ve often wondered about this aspect of things even in the UK; after all we sometimes take our National Lottery tickets to a shop to be checked and if you are anything like me you hand the ticket to the assistant who scans it, says “sorry it’s not a winner” and you ask them to chuck it in the bin. What’s to stop them telling you it isn’t a winner when in fact it is?
According to the story about the Ontario Lottery officers so far only four operators so far have been convicted or charged with defrauding customers of their winnings and with over 10,400 vendors in Canada that is a really small percentage.
The reason for the investigations come because last year a report was published by an Ombudsman in which the author, Andre Marin, claimed that fraud was widespread with many lottery ticket vendors cashing in some $100 million worth of winning tickets.
Lottery ticket vendors in Canada are supposed to rip through the bar code of the winning ticket before discarding it but some have been found not to be doing this meaning the winnings can be claimed again hence the clamp down by the Ontario Lottery officers.
Although from reading further into this story the issue isn’t with the investigation as a whole but the treatment of vendors by the investigating Ontario Lottery officers with one store owner saying “The lottery officers have treated me in the worse way in my 20 years in Canada; they try to scare new immigrants and it is really upsetting.”
Page Last Updated: 05/10/2011 15:26:06
