Staff from the RocketNews24 website spent 5 days scratching the 5,000 tickets.

Here's the idea. Buy 5,000 scratch-off tickets with a potential of $US233,000 in prizes. Get a team to scratch them over the next 5 days. Then buy a house, a Ferrari, and travel the world on the profits.

So a group from the Japanese website RocketNews24 headed by Yoshio visited their local lotto store to start the test, which was an event by itself. They were swarmed by spectators as they purchased the National Lottery of Japan's scratch-off tickets in bulk.

According to the team's calculators, they would expect to at least recoup about 378,000 yen (US$3,500) of the initial 1 million yen (US$9,000)  investment. What happened?

Their guess was right. After a grueling scratchathon, they made back 365,200 yen (US$3,400) of their initial cost – a mere 36% return. They had lost US$5,500.

As one of the group, Mike, summed up: "We suppose it’s good to have a glass-half-full kind of attitude at times like this."

SOURCE: RocketNews24