ONLINE PLAYWIN LOTTERY! A BIG JOKE!!!!!!!!! I have got a very strong reason to say that the much publicised Playwin lottery is a humbug.
I was tempted to play online lottery and hence ordered for a Times ITZ cash card during September, 2004 from Indiatimes.com and my journey to a series of problems began. First of all let me explain the process to play online lottery with the ITZ cash card.
After procuring the ITZ cash card one has to go through the initial online registeration process on the https://my playwin.com site. After entering our playwin user name and password one has to enter our ITZ cash Ac. No., which is a 12 digit No. on the card and our password which is a 4 digit No. on the card. Then one has to select the game we wish to play and start playing the game. There are 2 options to play the game viz.
Self-pick.
Lucky-pick.
Each game has a different set of numbers. For e.g. to play Super Lotto one has to select 6 numbers, for Thunderball and Fast Lotto, 5 numbers of your choice and so. For the self-pick we have to place the bets by selecting any six or five numbers between 1 and 49 depending on the game you select.
The lucky-pick is an option wherein the computer randomly chooses numbers for you. The amount for each game is Rs. 10, which is deducted from the individual's card.
I got myself registered in the playwin site as per the instructions. In the initial attempts that I placed my bets, the playwin site was awfully slow and when I called their helpline, I was told by their staff that the site is under maintainance, hence this problem.
After a couple of days I once again logged- in and played my bet Nos. This time I played a single ticket of Thursday Super Lotto. But after I clicked on the finish button I got a message that ''your bets are invalid''.
So I was forced to play the game once again with the same 6 bet nos. and this time my bet was valid. The subsequent Saturday I once again faced the same problem and as earlier I played the same nos. And to my utter surprise when I checked the status of my card on the net for e.g. balance, no. of games played, etc., the games which were supposed to be invalid were actually claimed as valid and the appropriate amount was deducted from my balance.
After reaching the helpline and explaining my difficulties they were kind enough to return the deducted amount in my balance. Since the past one month the playwin site is very slow and it takes ages to log-in and access the various links.
Their telephone no. 56997575 through which one can play the game with the help of the ITZ card is also temporarily disconnected. The option of playing through sms No. 7575 is also unpredictable and sometimes the game does not get registered. I wonder what is happening.
Its a shame that we Indians cannot even maintain a developed site. We Indians claim ourselves to be pioneers in IT, but seeing the playwin site I am forced to conclude that nothing has changed and we still cannot provide proper service in the publicised games site.