New record as 5m digital lottery tickets bought up in first few hours

Lawan Saengsanit, chairman of the Government Lottery Office (GLO)’s board of directors, said 7,167,500 digital lottery tickets for the August 1 draw had been put on sale at 6am on Sunday and 5,143,748 had been bought up by 1pm. The tickets were bought by 737,634 users of Krung Thai Bank’s Paotang app.

This is the fourth lot of digital lottery tickets sold by the GLO at 80 baht each, and the lot has been increased from 5.15 million to 7.17 million in response to surging demand.

Lawan said the GLO will gradually increase the number of lottery tickets by one or two million per draw.

He said this gradual increase will give small vendors time to adjust, adding that the GLO will try to strike a balance between the two sorts of tickets to help small-time vendors survive.

He also dismissed rumours that the digital lottery tickets were being snapped up by a handful of people to resell at their websites. It has been alleged that these rumours were started by angry vendors unable to sell their tickets due to the popularity of the digital version.

Lawan said data shows that the 5.1 million digital tickets for the previous draw had been bought by some 900,000 individuals, which means each person bought only five or six tickets. He said there was no indication that any one person bought an unusually high number of tickets.

He also said that the GLO did not find any large-scale vendors reselling digital tickets, but did catch and take action against some small vendors who were reselling them.

Meanwhile, GLO director Noon Sansanakhom on Sunday warned people against buying previously bought digital lottery tickets. He explained that the Paotang app records details of who has bought the ticket and since digital tickets cannot legally be resold, the initial buyer will be the winner.

“If you buy tickets from someone else, you will have problems in claiming the winnings,” he said.