I don't know what the story is today, but some years ago I worked in the same office tower as the Ontario Gaming Corporation, and I had a nodding acquaintance with some of their systems people.
They told me that employees were allowed to purchase tickets. The theory was, if employees can't be trusted to buy tickets, there must be a flaw in the system. And if there's a flaw in the system, then it will be exploited whether you prohibit employees form directly purchasing tickets or not.
That obviously does not map directly to the employees of companies that print scratch-and-win tickets, of course.
Good point. If you read the Harper's article [0] about the Joan Ginther, the "luckiest woman on earth" mentioned in this thread's top comment, she seems to have gamed the system basically by having an inside man or two (while also being good at math).
The Philadelphia Inquirer did a better job on that story. Nobody "inside", just using all publicly available information to "count packs" and piling up tax write-offs (click through to all three articles):
