Lottery Fraud by Retailers Is an Identity Resolution Problem
By Robert Barker, Infoglide Senior VP & Chief Marketing Officer
Lottery Post ran a piece last week on suspicious winnings in the North Carolina Lottery. It seems a regular lottery player contacted NBC affiliate WCNC in Charlotte about a pattern of winnings that seemed unlikely. The station’s investigators used the Open Records Act to obtain information from the lottery and subsequently uncovered that “of the lottery retailers winning prizes, some are amassing significant jackpots repeatedly — $100,000, $300,000, and $500,000 prizes — dozens of times a year.”
The problem isn’t restricted to a single state, and similar problems have been reported in Canada as well. Dateline NBC did a complete show on lottery fraud a few days ago that presented a clear understanding of how the fraud works. The video you’re about to watch starts with one fraud victim’s story and then explains how the crooked retailers are apprehended and just how widespread the problem is becoming.
(Excerpted from Dateline NBC – all rights reserved by the National Broadcasting Corporation)
The danger for the lotteries themselves is that the number of consumers feeling at risk about being paid on a winning ticket could reach a tipping point. An affected lottery could see a substantial decrease in revenue almost overnight, and it’s difficult to predict when that tipping point will be reached.
The good news is that identity resolution technology can help solve the problem. For lotteries maintaining any kind of information on participating retailers, identity resolution combats the fraud by identifying non-obvious connections between retail employees and the people making the claims. Going beyond simple householding, identity resolution can find second and third level connections and can provide the forensic trail needed to prosecute the fraudsters.
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