That’s the Ticket: Addressing a Different Kind of Lottery Fraud
Type “lottery fraud” into Google, and you get lots of returns warning about the dangers of Nigerian lottery scams and other phishing attacks on unsuspecting, and/or perhaps overly optimistic, consumers. But there are less well known types of lottery fraud also being perpetrated, and some of them hurt consumers as well.
Think about this. You take your lotto ticket into your neighborhood convenience store and ask the clerk to check to see if it’s a winner. He tells you the ticket’s a dud. And, let’s be real, they often are. I know, I know, someone has to win. OK.
But what if it actually is a winning ticket? The clerk switches it with a losing ticket, gives you back the loser, and keeps the winning ticket. He then gives it to his girlfriend or brother or other relation, and they take your ticket into the lottery offices and cash it in.
That’s basically what happened to Bob Edmunds of Coboconk, Ontario. He was cheated out of $250,000 when a clerk switched his winning lottery ticket. His story eventually came out and created quite a stir in Canada.
According the CBC news, “The story not only resulted in victory for Edmonds himself, it also struck a remarkable chord with Canadians. The program drew one of CBC’s largest television audiences this season, and provoked a flood of e-mails and messages.”
Mr. Edmonds story has focused attention on this type of lottery fraud and has resulted in an independent investigation into the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation to see if, as some suspect, this is not an isolated incident. It stands to reason that other cases will turn up not only in Canada but other countries as well.
And once again, this is a problem that could be solved by tapping into available data to determine who’s who and who knows whom within those data sources. The connections are there, but it takes an identity resolution solution to find them.
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