“Lots of people buy lottery tickets in bulk to give away as prizes for contests,” he says. He asked several Toronto retailers if they would object to him buying tickets and then exchanging the unused, unscratched tickets. “Everybody said that would be totally fine. Nobody was even a tiny bit suspicious,” he says. “Why not? Because they all assumed the games are unbreakable. So what I would try to do is buy up lots of tickets, run them through my scanning machine, and then try to return the unscratched losers. Of course, you could also just find a retailer willing to cooperate or take a bribe. That might be easier.”
This to me seemed to be the core of the problem; not that the cards were crackable, but that it was possible for a user to select what card to purchase rather than just what game to play. Remove that and the problem largely goes away through simple education about valid play procedures as I suggested.
(* I say educated, but there's the infamous 'Winter temperatures' scratchcard which rather undermines that concept - http://menmedia.co.uk/manchestereveningnews/news/s/1022757_c...)
I grew up in Maine and tickets are dispensed this way. Not sure about returning tickets, but knowing Mainers, I'd be surprised if they would take them back. It doesn't pass the straight-face test.
There is a crackdown on relatives of store owners winning the lottery - but is normally them defrauding winners who come in to check the ticket.
In theory, the tickets are not actually visibly different. In practice, apparently they are, just not in entirely obvious ways.