[Calavar]

At a certain point it falls to personal accountability. A would be lottery ticket buyer can get all that info in 30 seconds by googling "How likely am I win to win the lottery?" If they don't do that, that's on them.

Advance fee scams are different because 1) they are telling outright falsehoods and 2) they come cloaked in a broad variety of disguises, which means that a naive web search is not guaranteed to unveil the deception

[Algemarin]

A user can just as easily identify a scam such as the one in this post by also taking 30 seconds to do a web search for some phrasing from the email.

And "if they don't do that, that's on them"? This is victim blaming in both cases.

[Calavar]

IMHO, if you don't spend one afternoon out of 365 in the year researching what to do with your money and you lose money as a result, you can't claim victim status. It's analogous to being out of shape because you never go to the gym. Good results take effort. It's not someone else's fault if you never put in the effort. And the effort needed to learn how to make sound financial decisions is actually a lot less than the effort of going to the gym every day.

To draw another analogy, let's say you don't max out the pretax contributions on your 401k even though you have the means to do so. There are tens of millions of people in this situation right now, losing thousands of dollars in potential retirement savings each year. Are these people victims too? What is the difference between them and people who view lottery tickets as an investment vehicle? In both cases it's a financial loss due to lack of research.

In any case, I suspect that most people who buy lottery tickets are doing it for the entertainment value (the thrill of gambling), in which case dropping $20 on a lottery ticket every week isn't much different than dropping $20 on the movies. It's hard to to call them victims from that standpoint as well.