Six Charged For Hacking Lottery Terminals To Spew Only Winning Tickets (theregister.co.uk)

An anonymous reader cites an article on The Register: Six people have been charged with exploiting a bug in lottery terminals to print off winning tickets on demand. Connecticut prosecutors say the group conspired to manipulate automated ticket dispensers to run off '5 Card Cash' tickets that granted on-the-spot payouts in the US state. According to the Hartford Courant, a group of shop owners and employees set up the machines to process a flood of tickets at once, which caused a temporary display freeze. This allowed operators to see which of the tickets about to be dispensed would be winning ones, cancel the duff ones, and print the good ones, it's alleged. The winning tickets would be cashed and billed to the state lottery.

Comments

Re:Money Lust Before Sanity

[smooth wombat]

Thing is, I bet that the lottery companies know the average win rate of the tickets per machine.

Yes they do. From the article:

The Courant says that the lottery commission wised up to the scheme back in November when it heard that people were winning the 5 Card Cash game at a higher-than-expected rate.

So almost any deviation from that percentage would have been a yellow flag.

Which it did:

The game was temporarily halted.