taking on the 50-50 raffle scam

There is no bigger scam in this world than those charity 50-50 raffles.. I'm all for donations but when it's put under the guise of a 'lottery' I get leery.    First of all, who the hell is counting that money to make sure that the charity is really getting a fair 50% stake?  I remember that they ran these things during our pee-wee football and the guys handling the money all had names that ended in a vowel and then was farmed out to a bunch of dudes who worked in the DPW.   You hardly trusted these guys to handle your garbage and now you were going to assume they were going to be honest with a few hundred bucks of basically undocumented and untraceable money.    Honestly I doubt there is any auditing going on to make sure the amount of little pull off-tickets is equal to the total pot but even if you counted tickets they always have these completely ludicrous buy-in amounts like $1 per ticket, $5 for 15 tickets and $10 for 50.  These buy-ins are so designed so that there is virtually no way to track how much money went into the pot..  I remember during high-school football games would announce the pot amount sometime in the third quarter and they would always come up with some round number like $250.    I was always skeptical because I was sitting in the stands and would see groups of families shelling out $20's like they were napkins and old ladies signing over social security checks.    I can't say I've ever counted but I'm sure they were collecting a thousand bucks per game

but even if you can get past the unscrupulous behavior of a few of those ticket collectors and their gambling ring what really gets me is that you can't win.   I'm not talking about a cynical 'house always winning' mentality but when you win a charity 50-50 there is a ridiculous amount of pressure to donate your winnings back to the charity.     If you don't give back to the charity you look like some kind of scrooge eventhough it is supposed to be a win-win situation for both the participants and the organization.   So I'm not participating anymore