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