Is there a difference between buying a lottery ticket online or offline?

pjcox2005

Arguablly a higher chance of winning as if you go through Quidco the first time they pay you to play. Put the money into tickets, and then for £1 you'd have about 5 tickets so more chance.

Obviously after that it's exactly the same odds

alexlyne

I don't normally peruse the savings and investments forum.... interesting to see a post on a lottery in here... I guess it is an investment, just perhaps not a very good one

EarthBoy

alexlyne wrote: »

.... interesting to see a post on a lottery in here... I guess it is an investment, just perhaps not a very good one

The lottery is not an investment, by any stretch of the imagination. It's a gamble. Sometimes it pays off, but mostly it doesn't. The OP just posted on the wrong board.

nzseries1

You're actually asking two questions. The second is "is there a better chance of winning", to which the answer is no. The first, however, is "is there a difference". In my opinion, there are two massive differences.

StevieJ wrote: »

Actually there is more chance of winning if you purchase online, you can't lose your ticket

I think to the contrary.

1. If you bought online and won, you have absolutely zero proof (other than emails which can easily be faked) that you bought a ticket in the first place. It would be your word against theirs in case of any disputes. At least buying a physical ticket, you have proof in your hand.
2. Often when I go to the national lottery website, it says in huge glaring letters "We think you're outside the UK and Isle Of Man", even though I'm not. The last thing I would want to happen if I won £100,000,000 is for it to be declined because "they thought" I was outside the UK, which is generally unprovable either way.

No way in hell will I ever buy lottery tickets online.

ed123_2

"The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention ... It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant ... the prizes were largely imaginary. Only small sums were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being non-existent persons."
1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four)
Part 1, Chapter 8.

StevieJ

ed123 wrote: »

"The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention ... It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant ... the prizes were largely imaginary. Only small sums were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being non-existent persons."
1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four)
Part 1, Chapter 8.

Some truth there, this guy was supposed to have won £10 mil a few years back and he is now signing on

StevieJ

nzseries1 wrote: »

You're actually asking two questions. The second is "is there a better chance of winning", to which the answer is no. The first, however, is "is there a difference". In my opinion, there are two massive differences.




I think to the contrary.

1. If you bought online and won, you have absolutely zero proof (other than emails which can easily be faked) that you bought a ticket in the first place. It would be your word against theirs in case of any disputes. At least buying a physical ticket, you have proof in your hand.
2. Often when I go to the national lottery website, it says in huge glaring letters "We think you're outside the UK and Isle Of Man", even though I'm not. The last thing I would want to happen if I won £100,000,000 is for it to be declined because "they thought" I was outside the UK, which is generally unprovable either way.

No way in hell will I ever buy lottery tickets online.

I think I am more likely to lose my ticket than the home of good causes trying to diddle me out of my winnings

nzseries1

StevieJ wrote: »

I think I am more likely to lose my ticket than the home of good causes trying to diddle me out of my winnings

Yeah you're probably right!

But I can't help but think that it just takes one disgruntled National Lottery staff member to look in their database for the winning 100 million pound ticket details, change the "account ID" of the ticket to their own ID, and just like that, the winning ticket belongs to them!