Is There A Lottery Conspiracy?

We've all seen them. We've all been behind them at a gas station as we wait to pay. Perhaps you're one of them. All we want to do is pay for our gas and get to work, or more importantly HOME!
But, time and time again, over and over we have to wait for the person in front of us to make up their mind. There is an important decision being made right now.

"Do I want the 'Daily Double or the Pick '3'? Do I want a 'Merry Money' or the 'Christmas Cash'"?

" Gimme a Lucky 7's scratcher and a PaaarBall please, and a pack of Camels in a box"


Question:
When did our local convenience stores turn into a riverboat casino, and why should I have to stand behind these poor pathetic people in line whilst they make such major life decisions such as "Do I do quick pick or just let the machine pick the numbers for me".


Ahhh but alas I know I am out numbered in this fight so I keep my mouth shut, day in and day out. Well hopefully you all will give me a chance to vent. But, more importantly I believe there may be a conspiracy involved here and it makes me sad. Let me explain.

I was in sales covering my entire state. There was no podunk backwoods town that I didn't travel to. It really opened my eyes to a different way of life. Many of these small towns are very poverty stricken. This is where the lottery problem was the worst. GOD forbid I should have to stop at a local gas station to ask for directions. You're looking at a 10 min wait behind a line full of people buying countless scratcher tickets.

It occurred to me that these poor people, some of whome don't look like they knew where they were going to get their next meal were spending 10, 30 A HUNDRED DOLLARS!!! on pieces of paper worth nothing. I will never forget the time I was behind a lady who looked like she has seen better days to put it mildly,
and she bought $500 in powerball tickets!!! Ohh but wait I'm not done, there's more. She put it on a credit card!!!!!!!

Now I understand that they were all adults making their own choices and no one forces them to do it. They all have free will..yadda yadda...
but at some point this called taking advantage of peoples weaknesses. It may not legally be wrong but certainly ethically and morally it is.

Moving right along. Isn't the money supposed to go to the schools, in part anyway?? Don't my tax dollars also go to the schools?? With all this money going to "THE SCHOOLS" why in the hell am I sent a letter from the schools each summer telling me that I will need to furnish what amounts to at least $50 or more worth of supplies?

In closing and getting to the point, I believe, but have no direct proof of course, that the poor are being kept poor so the rich can stay rich. This is sad to see and who can blame the poor people for wanting a way out of their poverty. This is probably the only way it can happen for these people. It is not the answer!!!! If they took all of the money they spend on paaaarball and scratcher tickets and invested it or even stuffed it into a sock drawer it would be better than blowing it on useless paper.


What say you??

reply to post by Jesus H Christ


Well Jesus, I don't think it is really a conspiracy. It is simply a way to fleece more money from the poor. I don't think that they try to hide that. They try to disclaim it by calling it "entertainment and should not be played for investment purposes" but you know that a large chunk of the money that is made comes from poor people hoping for a big payout. I don't think many wealthy people are entertained by the lottery.

In the UK, Camelot have held the lottery license since its inception. That to me is a con as it's obvious they are in cahoots with the quango lottery administrators and BBC.

They also seem to have more products than banks with the amount of different chances to win each week.

If people just learned to not spend beyond their means and cut up any crappy credit cards, then people will eventually become empowered with their own finances. Sadly, they are given money they can't afford to pay back and lottery tickets are just scams to give them some BS glimmer to free themselves from the shackles of debt, which ironically pushes them further into a financial abyss.

reply to post by Karlhungis


I suppose I use the word "Conspiracy" to freely. Hey, I'm an ATS member, what do you expect. But I stand corrected.

Anyone who has not seen the movie "The Island" should do so. There are ALOT of very interesting parallels with regards to the lottery in that movie.

Originally posted by Karlhungis
Well Jesus, I don't think it is really a conspiracy. It is simply a way to fleece more money from the poor.

At one point I heard lotteries referred to as "A Tax on Imbeciles", and I stopped buying tickets. Then one of my best friends won a million, Canadian, tax-free, so I now spend my $10/week. If he can do it so can I

I would love to respond to this thread, but I don't want to jinx my date with Lady Luck.
You see, I was recently informed by some rather official looking mail that I might be a probable final contestant in the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes.

In all seriousness, the odds are better to be struck by lightning than winning, but some think it's "their turn." (Especially if they've been praying for it or feel they "deserve" to win.)

Admittedly, on occasion, I have purchased a few single scratch offs as "gifts." Talk about great service from a bartender. Given the 'potential' that you have tipped them a million plus dollars, they will keep your glass full all night. (I used to drink professionally.)

I do get your point and I don't know what makes some people so dumb, but whatever it is seems to be working.

Regards...KK

[edit on 12-7-2009 by kinda kurious]

reply to post by kinda kurious


I am not going to come off all holier than thou and say I've never bought one. From time to time (maybe a few times a year) I will buy one.
But, what I see in my home town everytime I stop to get gas, are the SAME peopleover and over, standing in line, wasting my time so they can decide what their poison is that day.

Some of the more polite ones will even stand to the side while they scrath off their tickets, only to get right back in line when they WIN a free ticket!

It seems to be a never ending cycle. As someone said, I don't think you'll find wealthy people standing in line to get their scratch off fix.

At the very least it is a fleecing of ignorant people, which there seems to be no shortage of. I feel genuinely sorry for these people. They are keeping themselves in poverty.

Maybe lottery and scratch off tickets should only be sold inside casinos, or speciality places dedicated to such activities, because it is a form of gambling, and all those poor people standing in line are gambling addicts in a poor sort of way.

Anyway, even if they do win a million dollars they'll probably blow it all in a couple of years because they are not used to having and managing significant amounts of money. It has happened time and time again.

In Australia lottery tickets are not (and cannot be I think) sold at petrol (gas) stations. So I do not experience the problem you are describing about having to wait while the person in front decides which type of ticket they want to purchase. But you do get a bit annoyed when the clerk offers every single person who pays for their petrol a chance to save an extra 30cents per litre if you buy 2 chocolates. Yep, the junk food industry has infiltrated the gas stations!

Over here the only real place to buy a lottery ticket is at a Tattersalls newsagency (convenience store with a Tattersalls logo out the front). So yeah it is common for people in front of you to make a lottery purchase, but MOST places have a separate line for lottery tickets and everyday items such as newspapers, stationary, magazines, cards etc. Perhaps this makes my view of the Lottery as more favourable because I do not get inconvenienced by people buying lottery tickets like you do.

My answer to the question posed in the OP:

YES, there is a Lottery Conspiracy!

First keep in mind we have lotteries that range from about 5 numbers to 7 roughly. Here's my reasoning why it might be rigged:

Basically, tickets for a lottery draw can be purchased any time from its initial announcement up until about 1-2 hours before the draw takes place. So let us assume for arguments sake that this deadline is 7:30pm (and the draw takes place at 8:30pm). Regardless of how many tickets are taken, how many different types of patterns etc. EVERY combination of numbers that are eligible to be winning have been recorded and stored in the system, ONE hour before the draw takes place.

In essence, this means that those who have high access to the database can assess what types of combinations, how many of these types have occurred, when and so on. Yes there would be so many and dividends for the results aren't calculated until about 2 hours after the draw. But I think this is an act put on. Technology these days, especially for a large successful Lottery company, would be good enough to calculate dividends within a maximum of 20 minutes I estimate.

So what they do is, they observe buying patterns and organise when a draw should jackpot and how many winners there will be. Remember, the bigger the jackpot, the higher the number of people that will play. Which means more tickets that will be bought, which means higher commission for Tattersalls!

Even if genuine winners exist, the winning combination may have been decided 15 minutes before a draw even took place! I do not think this is so far-fetched, but I do not mind if you want to label me as crazy cause most people do when I explain my views on the lottery.

[edit on 12/7/2009 by Dark Ghost]

Why do I have to stand in line while people buy beer, wine, cigarettes, or anything else for that matter?

The convenience stores that keep the hard liquor behind the register are the worst -- I have to wait forever while people make their decision about what size/brand of vodka offers the best deal...etc. Whats on sale they always ask.

This is simply a case of you being annoyed by something you are not interested in. Reasonable? yes. Conspiracy? No.

I mean: people who want alcohol should be made to go to a liquor store or bar only.

People who want tobacco should have to go to a tobacco shop.

See how crazy it can get weeding out all of the people that buy things others find a waste?

PS - I will agree with you on one thing though: if they want to buy lottery tix, they should have to have their numbers ready and written. I get annoyed to when they start rattling off all of their pick 3 and pick 4 numbers verbally. Takes forever!

reply to post by Dark Ghost


The lottery is profitable without a doubt. But if you look at the Mega Millions information for example, you will see that more than $500M was won in the last year or so.

People do win. What people don't realize though is that you have the same (pathetic) chance of winning no matter how many people play. You are playing the odds of having an exact duplication of 6 numbers. Not that you are holding the winning numbers, as it would be in a raffle.

The odds of exactly those numbers appearing are the same no matter how many tickets are sold.

In a lot of ways, playing the lottery or scratchers is a reasonable choice. After all, even a pathetically small chance to win beats the zero chance you have to get ahead on most hourly wages.

Anyone working a minimum wage job or near it, say anything under $20/hour, has a smaller chance of saving enough to make a difference in their lives than winning the lottery. The money spent buys a chance at a better life. The poor-paying job just eats your time and locks you in poverty. Ask any poor person and have them tell you what happened to their painfully accumulated "savings". I'll predict that wherever and whenever they've managed to save enough to think about moving up, some disaster wiped them out: an illness, a traffic ticket, a car breakdown, TV went south, etc. It doesn't take much to wipe out a nest egg of a mere couple of thousand, while it takes forever to accumulate it at low wages.

If you win a hundred every now and then, it is an extra hundred all at once. The dollar or ten you spent would have gone for chips or beer, anyway. It's the idea of getting a large amount at one time versus glacially slow accumulation to get to the same amount.

What's sad is that gambling is the only way a lot of people will ever break out of poverty, as the corporate types make sure that their incomes are too low to survive on without constant sacrifice. You can't save your way out of poverty: you don't have the resources if you're poor.

Yup there sure is and it's that I havent won!

Seriously though there isnt a conspiracy for the lotto!

Originally posted by Jesus H Christ

I was behind a lady who looked like she has seen better days to put it mildly,
and she bought $500 in powerball tickets!!! Ohh but wait I'm not done, there's more. She put it on a credit card!!!!!!!

You cannot use a credit card to purchase a lottery ticket....state law forbids that! A percentage goes to the credit card company, there is a transaction fee, so even if it only came out to $1, the entire amount would not be going to the state.....

2$ a week on powerball is all they will get from me!
im going to win and its going to be sweet.

The money from the lottery fund doesn't go to schools or hospitals. It's used by municipalities as collateral to pay for other things like business development. There's your conspiracy.

The Lottery is simply a tax on people who don't know math.

What IS a con is being able to buy scratchcards when there are no prizes left. that really sucks.

But there is websites(at least for the uk) where you can check how many and what prizes are left for individual cards on sale.

www.national-lottery.co.uk...

But i have won quite few times on scratch cards (nothin more than 100)

[edit on 12-7-2009 by MR BOB]

Originally posted by A.M.L.
The Lottery is simply a tax on people who don't know math.

Unless, of course, you win a million like my friend did. Lightning does strike.

reply to post by JohnnyCanuck


I am aware that peolpe do win. The unfortunate fact is that there is no shortage of people who are so desparate to find a way out of their miserable condition that they get sucked into the only thing they think can lift them out of it. THE LOTTERY!!!!!!

This is simply not true. The power of manifestation is available to all of us if you know how to use it. Our thoughts are the single strongest force in the universe. This is why even when people do win it big they lose it all very shortly thereafter. If you can not convince yourself that you are worthy then you will never live in abundance, winning lottery ticket or not!!!!