[No particular location] Suppose I print a hundred scratch cards with odds of 1:1000. In the print run, none of the cards were selected to be winners, so there is no chance of winning. Is that illegal?
What I mean by this is, I used a program to pick whether a card is a winner or not, with preset odds that are advertised on the cards, and none of them were selected - this is not a rigged game. If I don't print enough for there to have been a winner, is it illegal to sell the losing ones?
Posted Nov 4, 2018, 9:42 PM UTC
211
It would probably not be legal even if you printed all 1000 - I don’t know of any state that allows private lotteries
What about raffles, like they have at fairs or whatever?
Really? Then who prints scratch cards?
The government.
That seems...off. You're saying that every scratch card in the US (chosen for convenience) is owned by the government? Including the ones sold in convenience stores? Because a cursory web search suggests private companies can be licenced by state gambling commissions to print their own.
Generally speaking, state gambling commissions hire companies to manufacture the scratch cards. The state is still the institution that collects the revenue and pays the prizes, not the company that prints them.
Which means that your scheme to run a lottery would be illegal. Regardless of whether there was a winner.