A headline caught my eye: it said something to this effect - Domino’s Employee Quits Job After Winning ₹9,43,49,014. A story such as this one would have created headlines and triggered TV coverage as well, ordinarily. But no mainstream publications seemed to carry any mention of this. So was this a hoax? Are all lotteries and jackpots just fiction?
The attention-seeking ‘headline’ leads to some shady looking site which purports to ‘report’ about a Dominos employee – Vihaan Patel from Ballari taking a 15-minute break, playing slots online and winning in excess of 9 crores. They all claim to offer limited period wins. Obviously, there are links on the page that lead to various other pages. Some directed to what appeared to be some sort of an evangelical site, some to film based sites and so on, and some to online gambling websites where one had to pay money to get started.
Similar online marketing scams have been seen before as well. Apparently, a McDonald employee who hated her work won some huge jackpot and quit her job. By some bizarre coincidence, the same thing happened to a KFC employee as well. So clearly, you need to beware of such ‘news’ items and not get conned into signing up and paying for things that promise crores and deliver nothing.
Abdul Ahmad Khadar from Kerala survived a plane crash. He then won a $1 million lottery at the Dubai duty free raffle! So delighted was he with his good fortune that he decided to do good things for the rest of his life.
…he was poisoned before he could enjoy the fruits of his good luck. He won a million dollars on an Illinois lottery scratch ticket. He died just a month later; investigators found out that the cause of death was murder by cyanide poisoning!
Mohijul Rahima Sheikh came to Kerala with Rs 100 in his pocket, as a labourer from West Bengal. A few days later, he bought a lottery ticket out of compassion for a handicapped seller – and he won!
Bimal Kumar Gajmar bet on India's first online lottery – the Playwin Sikkim Super Lotto. He won a whopping Rs 8.61 crores; even after taxes, this came to a cool Rs 7.75 crores!
Her daughter bought her a lottery ticket for Mother’s Day. When she scratched the ticket and found she was a winner, she couldn’t believe her luck! This entitled her to receive 2 lakh dollars annually!
Selling the winning ticket is the next best of course! Kulwinder Singh sold the winning ticket that earned the lucky winner a staggering 425 million US dollars. But he didn’t go empty-handed either. As the store owner who sold the ticket, he won a million dollars too! That's some luck, isn't it?
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