Electronic lottery equipment could be used by government lottery

BANGKOK: -- Finance Minister Korn Chatikavanij has said the idea to use already-contracted machines for sales of the official state lottery could help the government retain its contract with a firm providing the online lottery project as well as solving the overpriced lottery in the market.

Mr Korn said he wanted the Government Lottery Office (GLO) to first study the feasibility of fixing the number of ticket sales to each agent to enable the GLO to track the exact revenue earned from selling government lottery tickets and that exact prizes could be given away to winners.

However, risks are seen that not all the lotteries could be sold which means that prizes would be reduced and the underground lottery would still maintain popularity among the public, Mr Korn said.

Government lottery results are issued twice monthly, on the 1st and 16th.

His remarks were made after Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said earlier in the month that he opposed the online lottery vending project and the government could be sued by the contracted firm if the scheme is scrapped immediately.

Mr Abhisit has said he has assigned Mr Korn to find ways to eliminate the illegal lottery.

The electronic lottery machines could also be used in selling lotteries issued by the Government Savings Bank and the Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives, Mr Korn added.

-- TNA 2010-01-16

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Trying to reign in the street lottery and harness it for government use,

easier said than done, but if it generates revenue to help all the people equally a worthy aim.

Rather than just have the lions share to go to regional pu yais who just pocket it.

Or some under monitored Thaksin account as the last attempt at this proved to be.

The government well never eliminated the black market lottery.

let's have a crackdown on crackdowns.

They Thai lottery with its dole out of tickets, fixed number of printed tickets, small pay outs, non progressive jackpot, etc is at complete odds with those lotteries that appear to work world wide. I have not been aware of a illegal lottery system in countries with the computer issued tickets. With the option of picking some 2 or 3 digit number that some Monk, Magic lady, dream, chicken gut reader, and other mind boggling sources, the option of picking a specific number would probably dry up most of the illegal dens. There must be many examples of the very sequence that Thailand is considering, yet they seem to want to reinvent the wheel again with the old 'this is Thailand' mentality.

People use the illegal lottery, because they know they will pay out to the winners. Remember the legal 3 number version? A local went with his legal ticket to claim his winnings. The vendor hadn't handed in his slips. Luckily a local lawyer offered to take on his case v the government and won. The guy ended up with a lot more than his ticket was worth.

Let the 2010 Crackdowns roll on......

Trying to reign in the street lottery and harness it for government use,

easier said than done, but if it generates revenue to help all the people equally a worthy aim.

Perhaps. Yet, I might be a bit suspicious as to the ideal of 'government' and it's real interests of the people's well-being.

Some very big people are involved in the black market lottery, friends of the now prime minster, so that's the main reason the online was scrapped.

The government well never eliminated the black market lottery.

And I always thought that it was government officials who ran the street lotteries. Of course many of you are far too new to Thailand (arriving after 1997 when the IMF forced the Thai government to open up the labor pool a bit) to remember that infamous day back in the late 1980s when, on live national TV, the lottery machines locked up between two numbers. Soon thereafter, a suspicious electrical wire was found running from the machines, under the rug (and you know how common carpets are in Thai government buildings) into an adjacent room where it was discovered that some unknown ne'er-do-wells had been hacking into the machines for quite some time as to fix not the national lottery but some street lotteries.

That one definitely made world wide press cyle.

I remember reading that and getting a good laugh