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The French Lottery, La Française Des
Jeux, recently hit the headlines after it was
alleged that it offered a player a total of
€450,000 to prevent him from taking them
to court over misleading claims about their
scratch cards. According to documents in the
possession of La Monde newspaper, a letter sent
to Robert Riblet from a lottery lawyer offered
an initial sum of €300,000, with €150,000
extra to be paid later to "compensate him
for the work and cost of the inquiries generated
by his research".
What research is this referring to? Well, Mr
Riblet spent a considerable amount of time and
money buying 400 batches of scratch cards in
order to try and prove his belief that they
were not being distributed randomly, as stated
in promotional advertisements and materials.
Instead, Riblet maintained that the lottery
was distributing scratch cards according to
a controlled system which ensured that big wins
were evenly spaced.
According to Riblet, the French lottery is
operating, "a system designed to ensure
a regular flow of payouts rather than a sudden
rush in one city followed by a long quiet period.
Card addicts who know the game well increase
their chances by never picking cards from a
batch that has already had a big win. It is
a veritable fraud."
La Française Des Jeux rejected most
of the claims that Mr Riblet made following
his bulk-buying research, but did admit that
scratch cards were distributed in a "predominantly
random" fashion, and not a genuinely random
way. Officials said that this was done to ensure
"equity between players". However,
the French lottery rejected the idea that they
were making any misleading statements and highlighted
the fact that, under French law, "the intervention
of chance can be total or preponderant".
However events unfold from here, the offer
to pay Mr Riblet a total of €450,000 for
his efforts has ensured that they will be watched
very closely by the world's media.
8 June 2006
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