easternguy: It's not a forest, not out of bounds or in a hazard...but it's a lost ball. Talk about screwing me out of a couple of bucks!
Having experienced very similar situations on many of the holes on WGT I do hope that it is more of a factor of sloppy or difficult game coding rather than an intentional method to randomly increase revenue, which would then risk losing dedicated players who have a limited amount of $$$ to commit to this game. That said, I lost IRL 3 Top-Flite balls in 18 holes playing a brand new course to me this morning, luckily they weren't out-of-box balls, but ones I pulled from my shag bag. Ended up 6 over but still won the Nassau. So all is well.