CBC News: the fifth estate - Luck of the Draw

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Aired October 25,
2006 at 9pm
on CBC-TV
& October 27, 2006
at 10pm ET
on CBC Newsworld

WATCH the fifth estate ONLINE:

Runs 40:19
REPORTER: Gillian Findlay
PRODUCER:
Harvey Cashore
CO-PRODUCER:
Linda Guerriero
ASSOCIATE PRODUCER:
Albert Lee

Video available in Windows Media Player.

LUCK OF THE DRAW

We trust the people who sell us and check lottery tickets to be honest. But for some, the temptation to steal a small slip of paper worth hundreds, thousands, and sometimes millions of dollars, can be too strong. There are numerous stories, from all over North America, about legitimate lottery winners being cheated out of their winnings in just such a way.

This is the story of two retailers at one store who cheated an unsuspecting winner out of his lottery winnings and a lottery corporation who fought him when he tried to get back what was rightfully his.

Statistican Jeffrey Rosenthal looked at the OLG's numbers.

Statistician: Not possible

A fifth estate investigation looked into who has won major lottery prizes in Ontario in the past seven years. This investigation revealed that lottery retailers won around two hundred major prizes averaging a half a million dollars each.

The chance of this happening, according to Jeffrey Rosenthal, a prominent statistician at the University of Toronto, is one chance in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion – absolutely inconceivable. Clerks aren't luckier. Instead, some of them are actually taking tickets from would-be winners and claiming them for themselves.

Winning ticket stolen by clerk

The fifth estate focused on the story of now 82-year-old Bob Edmonds whose $250,000 winning Encore lottery ticket was stolen by clerks he trusted in the small town of Coboconk, Ontario in the summer of 2001. The clerks had taken his ticket and convinced the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation that they were the winning ticket's rightful owners.

Bob Edmonds with his family in Coboconk, Ontario.

If that wasn't bad enough, when Bob did uncover the scam, the OLG refused to admit that it was Bob's ticket and they denied any responsibility to him as a lottery player. In the end, Bob hired a lawyer to try to prove it was his ticket and he that was entitled to the quarter-million dollar prize. To do that he would have to take the OLG to court.

Did Bob get his money back? And could the same thing happen to you? The fifth estate reveals the answer.

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