I was watching a documentary about lotteries the other day and there were a few cases where the store attendants were telling the lottery winners that their tickets were worthless after scanning them and then claiming the prizes themselves (or getting their mates to do it). Could this be a case of something similar except the dumpster diver got their first?
Can somebody address this again?
How did the lady who bought the ticket make claim to it? A receipt linked to the ticket somehow?
This is why my mother writes and signs her name on every lottery ticket she buys. That way, if she loses the ticket, nobody else can claim the winnings. Do you think that would make a difference in a case like this?
If I found a winning ticket in the trash with a signature on it, I’d try to contact the original owner and lawyer up. I’d demand 75% of the winnings, and burn the ticket if she did anything other than agree to give me my cut.
The same could be said about people that have sold valuable works of art and other things at garage sales. They would never have sold it if they knew it was valuable, but the sales are binding and they no longer have claim to the items.
Truly you have the wisdom of Solomon.
Well, in fact, the scanner presumably has operated correctly something like 99.9999999999% of the time. Nothing can be perfect.
Why did this nitwit admit finding the ticket? Just go to the lotto commission and turn it in. Collect.
i don’t believe this is true. there was a story a number of years ago (i’m having trouble finding it now) about a boy who bought a baseball card from an old woman who had no idea it was valuable. apparently he misled her and thus the sale was not valid.
but an error can be so unlikely that there is a more probable explanation than the scanner failing.
Possible, but you added “apparently he misled her.” That can make a difference. It’s also probable that she didn’t plan on selling the baseball card (otherwise he wouldn’t have to bother misleading her), but he prodded her into it along with misleading her. What I said is true, but of course other factors can come into play and those other factors can be the reason certain sales are not binding.
Yes. I think there’s a key difference there. You could talk an old lady into doing something she did originally intend, but you can’t really con someone by paying the advertised price for something.
And on the subject of who own’s trash, there’s also going to be a difference between the trash you put out at the street to be picked up and your kitchen trashcan. If you accidently throw your Rolex watch in the kitchen trashcan, and your neighbor comes by to return something and pulls the watch out of the trashcan, they shouldn’t have any claim to it. It sounds like in this case the trash can was inside the store, and it’s more like your neighbor accidently dropping the watch in your kitchen trash can, then some other neighbor comes over and takes it out. If it was my kitchen trashcan, I’d say it was mine. (not really, i’m not that type).
**Stoid **is going to be so disappointed.
I wasn’t aware that there was a positive duty to make sure the other person gets a good deal. If I recognize a genuine Pollock at a yard sale, am I required to inform the owner that it’s actually a genuine Pollock and that it could go for millions of dollars or can I play dumb and buy it for the $1.50 she has it marked as?
In Australia once you throw something in the bin and then place it on your nature strip is actually becomes the property of the local council. This is to stop people going through recycle bins and pinching all the cans etc and also when hard rubbish is placed out side on our annual hard waste days [old couches, TVs etc]
There is also the “stealing by finding” law that has caught a few people unawares over the years in OZ. Here we would hand it in at the police station as “lost & found” and if it was not claimed within 3 months it would be the finders to keep.
Wait, you can only throw out an old couch once a year? And nobody can just take it? How do broke young people furnish their first apartments without being able to grab free furniture off the curb when other people are moving out?
In the case of a discrepancy between the ticket and the scanner, isn’t the scanner taken as correct though? I’ve noticed with scratch-off games like crossword, or bingo, this is typically the case. That said, I’ve never heard of a case of them being in disagreement.
You can take it to the tip sorry “Recycling Centre” anytime for a fee or do what I do leave it on someone else’s nature strip and hope someone grabs it.
Of course we completely ignore the rule on no scrounging of hard waste, picked up a really cool art deco table once.
So the idea is to prevent recycling? That seems really odd. The monetary incentive of finding cans is what gets them recycled.
I very rarely buy lottery tickets. Excluding the recent Mega Millions, for which I threw down $10 for fun, I’ve purchased 5 or 6 tickets in the last two years. I’ve had *three *where the ticket didn’t match the scanner - in my case, the scanner read the ticket as a “win”, but the numbers printed on the game piece didn’t actually constitute a win. **Half **my tickets haven’t scanned accurately.
These were all little piddly $2-50 wins on the $1 scratch-offs, so no huge deal, but the *reason *I had the tickets scanned was that the owner of the store told me to scan even the losers, because she’s noticed that some losing cards scan as winners. She scans every card someone drops in or in front of her store, just in case. And while I can’t tell you the official policy, she paid out my scanned-as-winning losing cards for me, so I assume she got her till money back from the Lottery folks.
So I think perhaps the scanners aren’t as competent as we assume they are. And this can work in your favor as well as against it.