: There is a growing public awareness that individuals with severe mental health issues require medical treatment and social support, not exploitation for gambling predictions.
: Psychologists view the practice of asking for lottery numbers as a coping mechanism for individuals facing severe economic hardship, driving them to find patterns and hope in completely random occurrences.
For decades, many grassroots gamblers believed that individuals with severe mental illnesses—often referred to locally as orang gila or more respectfully now as ODGJ (Orang Dengan Gangguan Jiwa)—possessed unfiltered access to the spiritual world. Gamblers would seek them out for several reasons:
To decode these encounters or dreams about them, gamblers turned to (traditional illustrated dream books). If a person dreamed of a madman, they would not just wake up and forget it; they would look up the specific "No Togel Orang Gila" in these books. The visual nature of these guides was crucial:
: These books feature grid-like illustrations where every object, animal, and human behavior corresponds to a specific two-, three-, or four-digit number.
While seeking numbers from vulnerable individuals was a documented historical practice in Indonesian underground gambling, society has shifted dramatically:
