It never fails that when lotteries get big, there are news stories about people flocking accross the border to buy the tickets. Why don’t they just sell them on-line so those folks can buy them all the time?
WAG, but it is probably something to do with the security issues involved in giving people the ability to print out their own lotto tickets, as well as opening up the lotto system for hacking. The motivation would obviously be very, very large to try and manipulate a system like that, so the less access the outside public has to it, the better.
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- I believe that you can buy Illinois lottery tickets by mail, and you can “subscribe” to certain numbers for X-many draws. How you pay I don’t know. I very rarely ever played the lottery myself.
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- I worked at a convenience store that sold tickets, and yet I don’t even know the complete reason–but Illinois lottery tickets are not sold on credit at all. I heard that it had to do with the fact that the selling store was on the hook for the ticket even if the payment method turned out to be bad–so stores simply would not accept anything but cash for them. In Illinois casinos you can’t gamble on credit either. They do have ATM machines for getting cash advances on your credit card, but then you take that cash over to the cashier and get chips for it–you cannot gamble directly on a credit card.
- As for debit cards, at the time I was there the store I worked at did not have the ability to accept debit cards at all, for anything. I know that the store that sells a ticket has to pay the Lottery for it even if the customer does not pay them, unless the tickets are obtained by outright theft, and then the tickets can’t be redeemed anyway, due to them having serial numbers–but if there is some official lottery rule against playing on credit I don’t know… and if gas stations now will allow lottery ticket purchases on debit cards now I don’t know either, but that I can ask.
- As for “security ssues with printing your own tickets”, I doubt that would be a problem, as lottery tickets now in IL are electronically verified before they are paid out anyway. At the gas station the lottery ticket is entered into the terminal and in about five seconds a redemption receipt comes out, and the gas station is supposed to keep the redeemed ticket and turn it over to the lottery, but even if the ticket is stolen at this point, if you take it anywhere else and try to redeem it again it won’t work. The lottery terminal will just tell the gas station cashier that the ticket is invalid, and not to pay out the winning amount on it.
- Outright stealing of scratch-off tickets isn’t done much anymore also, for the same reason. If a thief comes into the store and swipes a whole book of 300 scratch-off tickets and runs off, the gas station just reports the missing tickets as stolen, and then (after about 20 or 30 minutes) NONE of those stolen tickets can’t be redeemed at any location, because when run through any lottery machine, any winning tickets that were reported as stolen would show up as being invalid. …Instant (scratch-off) lottery ticket theft was SKYROCKETING until the IL lottery went to this system, of using serial numbers and requiring validation in the lottery terminal before payouts. Gas stations in the Chicago area were getting robbed, and all that was being taken was books of scratch-off lottery tickets. When I had the honor :rolleyes: of working at a gas station, the lottery terminals all shut off at 11:00 PM and turned back on at 6:00 AM, and after this system was first put into place I would get all kinds of shady people coming in the middle of the night, telling me stories of hardship and asking me to pay out on scratch-off lottery tickets they had because they needed the money “right away” for some reason (buddy in jail, house caught on fire, car got towed, whatever). And the tickets almost always had staple holes in them–which was a direct hint you see: because the procedure for redeeming them was to STAPLE the redemption receipt that the terminal prints out, directly to the redeemed ticket when it is accepted for payout. So the tickets they were trying to redeem had already been redeemed once, they were trying to pull a scam and coming around when they knew the terminal wasn’t on to check the tickets before paying (again).
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Illinois does, sort of.
Well DougC beat me to the punch by 20 minutes. That’ll teach me to preview. :smack:
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Do you know if that’s a function of IL law, credit card company policy or some combination of the two? A lot of credit card companies will not allow their cards to be used for online gaming, because of people who ran up huge debts and then refused to pay on the theory that online gaming is illegal and the debt was thus unenforceable. I couldn’t use my credit or debit cards to deposit to an online gaming site.
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Wow, I guess my question should have been "why don’t more states sell lottery tickets on line. Thanks guys.
I went ahead and tried (Go ahead and tell me it’s a tax for people who can’t do math, but a couple bucks a week is worth it to me to pay for daydreams) and they mailed it back. I need an Illinois mailing address to get a subscription.
Poop.
Some states also have laws setting a minimum age for playing lotteries, and that’s difficult to verify online.
My first guess was that possibly states object to selling lottery tickets online because that would enable residents from other states to play that lottery, and that the other state would dislike competition poaching in its hunting grounds. Then again, the example that some states actually do sell online shows that this might bot be the reason.
There are many security measures that would need to be put in place - eg. IP address verification to ensure that the Lottery Corporation is only selling to someone within their state or province.
Age restrictions are also another security issue - in our province I believe you have to be 19 or over to buy lottery tickets. So in order to ever purchase online, the Lottery Corporation would need to somehow be able to verify the age of the customer.
Also, retailers who sell Lottery Products would probably be upset at the loss of some of their lottery customers. Many stores have found that customers who stop in to buy a lottery ticket decide to also buy some milk, a bag of chips, a magazine etc while they’re there. And vice versa, many customers who stop at a gas station to fill up, or a convenience store to grab a loaf of bread or a Slurpee, will often be ‘reminded’ of a large jackpot or a new scratch ticket, and make that impulse purchase.
Most Lottery Corporations (at least in Canada) have responsible gaming policies as well, and offering tickets online, 24/7, may be contradicting those responsible gaming ideals.