An official lottery is a form of gambling in which people place a stake on the outcome of a drawing. Lotteries have been used as a way of raising money for public projects, including college education and the repair of bridges.

Increasingly, many state lotteries are also offering online lottery sales. In 2012, for instance, the Georgia Lottery started selling tickets online to major drawings such as Mega Millions and Powerball.

Some states also allow players to subscribe to ticket subscription services that allow them to buy tickets into every drawing for a week to many weeks on end. These can be an effective means of playing more frequently and often cost less than the same number of tickets purchased in person, depending on how often you play.

There are also a handful of offshore lottery providers that claim to sell tickets online by sending people out to buy them on your behalf from official retailers. These sites are not regulated in the United States and are potentially untrustworthy, so we do not recommend using them.

While lotteries are a popular way to raise money for state and local governments, researchers have found that they are inequitable. They tend to funnel a lot of money into low-income communities, which studies show are disproportionately made up of Black and brown Americans. Those communities are largely dependent on the lottery for jobs, social services and other basic necessities. And they pay a lot more in taxes to state lotteries than their wealthier counterparts, research shows.