Thais swarm to new digital lottery tickets

The move of the official bi-monthly Thai lottery to a digital form continues apace. Thais are showing their increasing preference to purchase their lottery tickets through the “Pao Tang” app, instead of through the traditional street lottery vendors.

The 7.1 million new digital lottery tickets for the August 1 draw are now available and can be bought 24/7 at the standard rate of 80 baht per ticket. The last bundle of 5.1 million tickets, for the recent July 16 draw, sold out in just two days, indicating the huge popularity of the new digital lottery app.

Authorities say they launched the new digital tickets to tackle the problem of perceived overpricing by some vendors, who sold some tickets with ‘lucky’ numbers at inflated prices. Now anyone can choose their favourite lottery ticket numbers and purchase as many lottery tickets as they want, online.

But some critics suggest that the new digital sales make it easier for scalpers to buy up huge quantities of digital tickets to on-sell at inflated prices. The traditional street vendors and physical tickets made it much more difficult for scalpers to rip off Thai lottery enthusiasts.

But Lawaron Saengsanit, chairman of the Government Lottery Office Board denies that they have seen any need to limit the amount of new digital tickets released by the Board. He says that there have been approximately 900,000 customers buying an average of five-six tickets each and “without any sign of mass purchasing by a small number of buyers.”

Thailand’s only legal gambling outlet is through the bi-monthly lottery, a widely televised event every two weeks, usually on the 1st and 16th of any month. The next lottery draw will be on August 1.