Marie-Anick Elie, president of the Beaufort Delta Dog Mushers Association, said they held a bingo recently to raise money for the club, but many people were upset they had to split their winnings with other people who were sold the same cards.

This was the first bingo the club had held, so before holding the bingo, Eli sought advice from some experienced players and callers, who warned her about the duplicates.

"Some people were complaining that they were having problems with duplicate cards, so I called back to New North (Networks) to ask if I could change my cards from the booklet to just single cards," Eli said. "They told me that you would have to be very unlucky to get duplicate numbers."

Since the booklets were cheaper than the single cards, Eli decided to go with the booklets.

"When we started the bingo, the first thing we know, we had nine winners for the single line go-go," she said.

The $1,000 prize had to be split between the nine winners and people were upset that they had to share with so many others.

She called New North to complain right away.

"They were very concerned about it and they apologized," she said. "They didn't charge us overtime and they gave us a discount on the cards."

Since there were so many winners, the New North employees had to work overtime answering the phones and checking cards.

Eli said she was grateful for the $2,000 the club made through the bingo, but put off by the added trouble from the duplicates.

Paul Komaromi, sales and marketing agent with New North Networks, said the duplicate cards haven't posed a problem until recently with the big bingos.

"It's just a random draw; our suppliers may print four printings and each box has 12,000 cards in it," Komaromi said. "If we get two boxes from the same print run, we sometimes get overlap with these huge bingos."

In the $35,000 jackpot game last week, the first game had 40 winners and the big jackpot game was split between 10 winners.

"Last week was a bit of an anomaly and we are still are investigating why so many winner on one game," he said.

"People take their bingo very seriously here," Komaromi said. "If something goes wrong, they'll phone everybody; they phone the town; they even phone us at home."