Bengal lottery scam: Lucky draws on unsold tickets, ED unearths fraud

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) officials probing the alleged financial fraud and money laundering through lottery tickets in West Bengal are probing three particular angles in the alleged scam.

The first angle is how the lottery entity under scanner had been doing the forgery with common people where lucky draws were drawn on the unsold tickets and not the sold ones, sources said.

Subsequently, fake winners were projected through advertisements through multiple mediums alluring people to purchase tickets. Sources said people often got trapped by such advertisements and purchased those tickets unaware of the fact that lucky draws would be drawn on the tickets purchased by them.

In this process, sources added, this particular entity and its agents mainly targeted people from weaker financial backgrounds who did not have any sort of formal education.

The second angle is that even the fake winner projected by the lottery entity just received a small portion, generally five per cent of the winning amount and the remaining was retained by the management of the lottery entity concerned, which comes under the typical case of money laundering.

The third angle, sources said, which is being probed by the ED officials, is the related areas where the said lottery entity invested their proceeds both within India as well as abroad.

Through these investments, the said entity converted its unaccounted money into account one, said the sources.

It is learnt that in June 2019 for the first time, a complaint was filed against the said lottery entity at a police station in south Kolkata. The complaint was the same lucky draws were drawn on unsold tickets.

At that time the city police started an investigation. A couple of persons were arrested and some bank accounts were also frozen. However, the investigation finally did not lead to a logical conclusion.

Last week, the ED officials conducted marathon raid and search operations at some locations in and around Kolkata, which included a lottery-printing press in the northern outskirts of Kolkata.

In this connection, the ED officials also confiscated unaccounted cash worth Rs 3 crore from the residence-cum-office of an agent of the said lottery entity at Lake Market in South Kolkata.

Leader of the Opposition in the West Bengal Assembly Suvendu Adhikari has been for quite some time alleging a major lottery scam in West Bengal in which several poor people in rural India have lost their hard-earned money. He has also alleged that important leaders of the ruling Trinamool Congress are the principal beneficiaries in the lottery scam.