VANCOUVER — B.C.’s lottery corporation has caught at least eight lottery retailers ripping off customers over the past two years, including one employee who pre-scratched more than 100 scratch-and-win tickets before putting them up for sale, The Vancouver Sun has learned. Details of the fraud are contained in internal BCLC (the former B.C. Lottery Corporation) documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Concerns over lottery fraud in B.C., first raised in late 2006, led BCLC to bring in a number of new measures, including having its security staff review every retailer win over $1,000. However, the records show that all eight confirmed fraud cases since 2007 involved prizes much lower than $1,000, suggesting dishonest retailers may be stealing smaller prizes because they know they aren’t as closely scrutinized.
Indeed, in all eight cases, BCLC only learned of the fraud after receiving a complaint. In the scratch-and-win case, a customer complained to the lottery corporation on Jan. 15, 2007, that a number of “Gold Rush” tickets at a store in Maple Ridge, appeared to have tiny scratches in the instant-win box. The following morning, a BCLC investigator looked through the tickets in the store’s display and sales-counter drawer and found 85 with tiny scratch marks on them. When the store manager arrived, he said he also had discovered a number of tampered tickets and handed another 28 over to the investigator. According to the investigation report, a night-shift worker confessed to the fraud. “The clerk admitted scratching these tickets as he was frustrated from having purchased three $20 Grand Prix Casino tickets and all were non-winners,” the report states. “The manager believed the clerk was trying to recover his losses by searching out winning tickets and claiming the prizes and . . . (returning the rest) to the display or drawer.”The store fired the employee in question and BCLC suspended the store’s right to sell lottery tickets for one week.
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