22-Nov-06. Lottery retailers’ wins tied to extra purchases of instant tickets. Globe and Mail, A7.

The Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. says that retailers appear to win a disproportionate number of instant-scratch ticket prizes because they purchase more lottery tickets on average that the general public. A recent survey of ticket retailers conducted by Decima Research concluded that they spend approximately twice as much on lotteries as do members of the public. The research was commissioned in response to the CBC-TV program “The Fifth Estate” which reported last month on the overall number of insider wins in Ontario in the past six years. Ontario is the only lottery corporation in Canada that tracks insider wins and investigates any win by an insider of $50,000 or more.