Some people don’t buy lottery tickets because they think the games are rigged. They point to a prominent example to prove their point: the Pennsylvania lottery scandal. This type of event discourages them from buying tickets. Should this concern you? Should this scandal prevent you from buying tickets?

What was the Pennsylvania lottery scandal? It was a plan by a newscaster named Nick Perry to rig the lottery ball machine for a Pick 3 drawing on April 24, 1980. His plan was to replace all the balls in the machine with weighted balls except the two balls – the number 4 and number 6 balls. The heavy balls would have no chance of coming out, so the winning combination would have to include only the numbers 4 and 6. There are only eight different possible combinations of 4 and 6 that could come out and Nick bought thousands of tickets with these combinations. The winning Pick 3 number that night was 666. Nick Perry won big.

However, the scandal was uncovered and Nick Perry was captured. He served time in jail. This was big news in the lottery world and ever since that day many people have been skeptical about spending money on the lottery.

In my opinion, it was precisely this event that made the lottery a safe game to play. Since this event, lotteries around the world have taken precautions to ensure that a lottery game is never tampered with again. They know that if another scandal like this ever happened, ticket sales would drop drastically. People would no longer play the lottery. Therefore, it is in their and everyone’s best interest to ensure that lottery games are fair and that everyone has an equal chance of winning. So you shouldn’t be afraid to spend money on the lottery.