The Great Lotto Scam

It had been a year since Tom started running the lottery pool. Even though it had won some small amounts of money, the lottery pool as a whole had been a real flop for all involved.

Special attention had been directed to the lottery this time. Forty-nine million dollars was a lot of money!

Since there were thirty-nine people in the lottery pool, all of them would be millionaires. The Florida lottery drawing was every Saturday evening. None of the participants would find out how much the winnings were, if any, till Monday when they run the numbers in the computer to match all the three hundred ninety tickets to the winning numbers.

As usual, Tom brought the tickets and the computer disc home so he could run the lottery results over the weekend on his own computer, knowing that the staff would be asking about the winnings early on Monday morning.

When the office pool was first started, all thirty-nine employees as a group picked out the three hundred numbers that they would use every week and decided to run another ninety tickets at random using the Florida lotto quick-pick method. As the pool grew larger or smaller by employees coming and going, the amount of tickets would change. Tom and Ed always threw in enough money to make it four hundred even.  Ed would take these extra tickets home with him so they wouldn’t get mixed with the office pool tickets.

Each Friday Tom would have Terry, Ed’s secretary, enter in her computer all the numbers on the ninety quick-pick tickets along with the three hundred that were already in the computer. After printing a list and making copies, Terry would distribute a copy to all the lottery pool participants. They could each check to see if they had any winners when the lottery numbers were selected on Saturday. It appeared no one ever bothered because they would find out on Monday what the results were anyway.

On Monday, when Terry found any winning numbers from Tom’s computer run during the weekend, she would enter them into the computer to double check Tom’s report and run off a list of the winners and how much money each ticket paid off. At the bottom of the list, was shown the total amount of winnings for the week. It was easy to find the winners, if any, just by pushing a few buttons and watching the winners as they showed up on the computer screen. Terry had the job done in a matter of minutes.

It flashed through Tom’s mind that this drawing was different, really different, because the Christmas holidays were on the weekend. Everyone had been busy getting ready for Christmas Eve on Friday.  Tom and Ed had bought the lottery tickets on Thursday as usual. The place was a little store down the street from the office where there was never a line to buy  tickets. The little old man behind the counter was a friendly guy, and always had a smile on his face as he wished them good luck and took their money each week.

     This time the difference was Ed’s secretary was able to put the pick-quick numbers in the computer on Friday as usual, but did not distribute copies to the pool members. Almost everyone left around noon. As Terry was leaving, she handed Tom the computer disc and tickets to check over the weekend. Yes, he was the only one that knew what the numbers were; he had the tickets and the only computer disc with the numbers entered on it.