Both a laughing matter and not
Someone has won the ₱43 million 6/42 Lotto draw last December 28. The winner was a 47-year-old housewife who guessed the 1834-01-11-28-04 winning number combination.
The only problem is that the photo released by the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office (PCSO) of the winner getting her check looks, to put it mildly, unreal.
To hold nothing back, it looks like the clothes she was wearing were cut out of another photo and copy/pasted into the image they released. It looks so bad it’s laughable.
The PCSO admitted they edited the woman’s clothes to hide her identity, after a previous winner was identified by her clothes coming home from getting her cash prize.
More often than not a bad edit is funny. We see them all the time in the internet. But why is this one rubbing many people the wrong way? Why are some people making a fuss about something that should be funny?
Because, as preposterous as it seems, it is raising suspicions that there was no actual winner, but that people in the PCSO are conniving to let their own conspirators “win”.
One of those who want to get to the bottom of this is Sen. Raffy Tulfo.
“There is a clamor to know the truth because many are saying that the person who won the ₱690 million was not a legit bettor but instead the friend of a person who invested ₱30 million to win that ₱690 million,” Tulfo was quoted as saying in a Philstar.com report. He is referring to a previous jackpot prize.
Bad edits aside, there is a legit reason to look into this. If bettors’ money is being used to enrich only certain individuals then that is anomalous indeed.
But on the other hand, we might also just be overreacting from something that should be treated with good humor. If something fishy is going on in the PCSO it’s likely that someone would have blown the whistle on this by now.
Let’s hope all the fuss and the attention being paid to all this --the Senate already conducted a hearing regarding this topic-- will lead to something. Otherwise it will just all be a big waste of time and money.