Fraud in chocolate prizes curbed by Gunther Grant

02-Oct-2012 - Last updated on 03-Oct-2012 at 11:02 GMT

Gunther Grant is no stranger to chocolate prize tickets...

Gunther Grant has developed a security feature for promotional prize tickets in chocolate bars used as giveaways in casinos to curb fraud among customers, it said.

The US firm, that owns several chocolate subsidiaries including Got Chocolates and Wonka Chocolates, has created individual Universal Product Codes (UPC) for each prize-bearing ticket.

Grant Newsteder, CEO of Gunther Grant, said this security feature may soon become a regulation enforced by the Law Vegas gaming commission.

When this happens, “we may become not the premiere but the only chocolate company chosen as our competitors refuse to adapt to this way of creating a secure environment for their customers”, Newsteder said.

Tasty fraud

The development was prompted when a casino customer approached Got Chocolates to develop a way to reduce fraud it had experienced in its chocolate promotional giveaway program.

Each chocolate bar in the giveaways contains golden tickets featuring prizes such as $10,000 cash and a new car. However, it was discovered that customers of the casino were replicating these tickets to claim prizes.

The technology investment has now ensured that each golden tickets featuring a prize now has one unique bar code that needs to be scanned when a customer redeems their winnings. This UPC is then removed from the winning pool database; a move that “prevents fraud and also tracks what prizes were not redeemed”, Gunther Grant said.

“Even if a customer did copy a ticket, it would not be able to be redeemed twice,” it added.