If you read the fine print for sweepstakes and drawings it says employees or family members of the sponsoring company and the advertising agency are not eligible.
For example, if a local car dealer gave away a car in a drawing. It wouldn’t be appropriate for his daughter-in-law to win. That would also be true of the radio station that promoted & advertised the drawing. At least some and maybe ?? all their employees would be ineligible too.
I’ve seen these disclaimers on sweepstakes all my life. I was even told as a teenage supermarket employee that we couldn’t enter a coca-cola sweepstakes. The winning prizes were marked inside the bottle caps. (back then it was returnable glass bottles) We could have gotten all the bottle caps we wanted from the bottle returns. We’d often find the discarded caps inside the cartons or stuck back on the bottle. A lot of customers never bothered checking them. The prizes weren’t exactly high dollar.
Who regulates sweepstakes? Are these rules federal or state law? Or are they guidelines that are voluntary followed as a good business practice?
How is this applied to lotteries? I was surprised to read that a clerk at a convenience store bought a ticket and won. She operates the loto machine. Isn’t there a conflict of interest?
I’m glad the lady won. Especially since she was required to buy the ticket to keep her cash register balanced. I’m just wondering why she’s eligible?
How is there a confilct of interest? As far as I can see, the only way for a store clerk to influence her chances of winning the lottery would be to sell herself lots of tickets for free. And if she did that, the management would presumably notice that her till came up short.
On the other hand, I can well imagine that people involved with maintaining and running the machines that choose the lottery numbers might be forbidden from taking part.
ETA: if I were the person who bought the other lottery ticket, I might be very pissed that my prize was cut in half essentially as a result of the clerk’s mistake!
As Eric Davidson; the Governor of Wentworth Detention Center, on the great Aussie soap opera Prisoner (Prisoner: Cell Block H) once told evil warder, Jock Stewart…
“Mr Stewart, in our line of work it’s not enough to BE honest, we must also BE SEEN to be honest. Your behaviour has been open to too many interpretations”
I’ve been looking around for a rules example to post. There’s not that many local drawings or sweepstakes anymore. They used to be common. Guess the number of marbles in a jar. Or fill out a ticket for a drawing. It was good advertising for local merchants. People stopped filling out drawing tickets when they found out the information was being sold to spammers. That ruined something that had been a lot of fun for everybody.
They just started a state lottery here within the past year. The first week it started someone was arrested for turning in a fake ticket. The cheats are out there.
What country are you talking about? I presume the US only, or do you want to know outside, too? And given that answers will vary from state to state, maybe you could narrow down the state?
Sweepstakes and prize drawings are usually done by private companies. Lotteries, at least over here, are controlled by the state (who also takes part of the fees and funds social and charitable projects with them.) Therefore, the rules will obviously differ.
I think Cecil covered this once, but can’t find the column now. Basically, as Markxxx alluded, sweepstakes aren’t required by law to exclude their employees and their families, they do it because the general public would suspect that employees might have a special chance, even if the procedure itself was above board. (And in the case of big companies like Coca-Cola, excluding all employees and their families means a lot of people who can’t participate).
By contrast, a state lottery where you pick 6 numbers out of 49 which are then drawn by a machine (that’s what a lottery is in my country) leaves nobody a possibility of influence, so I don’t see a reason why employees shouldn’t play, too.
In those lotteries where you rub an area to see whether you win or loose the person selling the tickets doesn’t know which ones are going to win, either, so again, there’s no advantage or influence.
I don’t understand the quoted part of the OP, though. If this is a lottery where the player selects numbers, why can’t the ticket be voided if the clerk input a wrong option? What kind of bad computer system is this?
Most of the sweepstakes I’ve seen lately covered the entire U.S. It’s usually a soft drink with a prize under the bottle cap. Or a fast food chain with scratch off prize cards. Sometimes they do a bingo style contest where you have to collect several bottle caps or cards to fill up a bingo card to win.
Employees of the Massachusetts state lottery are not allowed to play the lottery. I don’t believe that law applies to lottery agents (like convenience store owners).
Each lottery is mandated by the state, therefore, each lottery may have different rules regarding what people are allowed to play. In Louisiana, employees of the lottery and any persons residing in the same household as the employees are not allowed to play. I must point out, there is basically no way for an employee to cheat, short of stealing tickets. Even that is mostly useless. Scratch-off tickets are assigned to a retailer and only that retailer can activate them. Then, only that retailer can sell them and only after all that can a ticket be redeemed. Basically what I am getting at is that all of the regulations aren’t there because the state doesn’t want employees to cheat, but because of this:
The workers at the retail locations where tickets are sold are allowed to play, but they, and all winners, are investigated closely by the lottery security and audit departments. All of these regulations are Louisiana Lottery regulations, but what I’ve seen of other lotteries is very similar.