Pennsylvania lottery wins get probed

Frequent lottery wins in the Pennsylvania Lottery have risen concerns and forced the state to launch a probe.

US.- The Office of the Auditor General has reportedly launched a probe to study the unusually frequent lottery winners in Pennsylvania between 2000 and 2016, as he said. The suspicions come after many statisticians found the wins improbable.

A six month investigation carried away by PennLive determined that 200 people in Pennsylvania claimed 50 or more prizes worth US$600, a number that is improbably according to statisticians. Spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Auditor General’s Office, Susan Woods, confirmed that the probe has been launched and that they will start with the most frequent lottery winners. “We will also be reaching out to the Attorney General’s Office to discuss what might be the next best steps to ensure the integrity of Pennsylvania’s lottery,” she said.

As the investigation said, it is virtually impossible for a person to claim 209 lottery tickets worth US$600 since there is a chance of 1 to 10 million. That case dates a Mechnicsburg veterinarian who won US$348k from 2004 to 2016. The report says that those wins cannot be considered as luck.

The state’s regulations regarding the monitoring of lottery winnings is weak, therefore it’s not unlikely that the game was targeted by fraudulent schemes. State Senator John Blake, minority chair of the Senate’s finance committee that oversees lottery policy, expressed his support behind the review and said: “We would certainly consider any such recommendations before the Senate Finance Committee.”