Why Do Poor People Lose Lotteries?

Everyone knows that poor people play lotteries disproportionately more than others. What has long baffled researchers is that poor people also lose disproportionately more often than others. Up until now, I hadn't heard a sufficient explanation for why this is. But the other day, I watched a Dateline special by Chris Hansen that seems to do a lot to explain what might be going on.

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Dateline caught a pretty significant percentage of gas stations who kept the "winning" tickets if the player didn't check them personally. So, if relatively poor people are frequent players of lottery games, and frequent players are less likely to check their tickets personally, then they may be less likely to discover a winning ticket because of a dishonest store clerk.

It might be interesting to investigate the relationship between the level of lottery fraud in a state to the disparity between the percentage of winners per ticket purchased within income brackets.

Is there a measure or proxy for lottery fraud per state? Data on arrests would only reflect the number who were actually caught.