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Iowa Computer Programmer Gets 25 Years For Lottery Scam (desmoinesregister.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Des Moines Register: Eddie Tipton, the Iowa brainpower behind a case of multi-state lottery fraud, will spend up to 25 years in prison for rigging "random" drawing jackpots. It's unknown how many years Tipton will actually spend in prison. He could be paroled within three or four years, his attorneys noted. Tipton, 54, was a longtime computer programmer in the Iowa offices of the Multi-State Lottery Association who installed software that allowed him to pick winning numbers in some of the nation's most popular lottery drawings. His scam began to unravel following unsuccessful attempts to anonymously collect a $16.5 million Hot Lotto ticket that was purchased at a Des Moines convenience store in 2010. "I certainly regret," Tipton said. "It's difficult even saying that. With all the people I know behind me that I hurt and I regret it. I'm sorry."
At 54, he's someone who didn't like his job.
He should be ashamed for scamming stupid people out of their money...oh wait.
He did it with a computer. So, he should be found innocent!!! ...or something...
(Outside of deciding the break the law in the first place, of course)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
My big mistake was to mine reddcoins instead of mooncoins.
Uh, wait...
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don't go for the big prize keep it small under X that can be paid out by the local lotto store is unlike to rise a flag even more so then there like 1000's of them in a urban area. At least 30+ within 4 miles.
The big prizes lead to audits
the ball based ones are harder to rig and easier to test for loaded balls. Not some software with an RGN that can be hacked or worked out due to it being buggy.
That's was my reaction. Take out just enough, in cash, that with your probably meager pay you're doing pretty well for yourself. Then I noticed where he's from: Iowa. If you lived in New York City you could cash a couple dozen lottery tickets a week an never visit the same lottery agent twice, but if you lived in Cedar Rapids you'd get noticed eventually.
Still, trying to take out over a million bucks is crazy. In most states you can't take a large lottery prize anonymously, which he should have known.
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you only get to hear about the ones they discover though. Maybe the ball tampering they detect isn't the first occurrence
Nullius in verba
1) This is why the names of lottery winners are made public. There may be an exception or two, but the vast majority of states require the person's name to be made known.
2) In Pennsylvania, it is illegal for employees of the Lottery Commission, and their immediate families, to play any lottery games, even the small(er) daily drawings and scratch off tickets.
Sure, he could have given the big prize to someone else to collect, but then he'd either have to split it or risk the person keeping it all because he couldn't say anything.
What he regrets is they have caught him. Why do so many miscreants even bother to say that they regret what they have done, when it is obvious that what they regret is getting caught?
I thought this is why they have the video of people pulling the ping pong balls out of hoppers. I know at least Powerball (which is a MUSL lottery, same as where this guy worked), operates that way. It could still be scammed, but it requires physical access to tamper with the balls.
If a computer is picking the numbers it seems like a conflict of interest since the list of known printed tickets could also be interfaced with the computer.
You don't rig the drawing. You find a way to insert a record of the winning number being sold after the drawing. You get some blank lottery ticket paper and print yourself that winning ticket.
Have gnu, will travel.
The whole US health care scam runs to the tune of $2T a year. Nobody in jail. Everybody whining that they need another blood funnel called "healthcare" jammed in as well..
Simple solution. Hire somebody to cash the ticket. Both parties get proof that they were conspiring to defraud the lotto, so if one screws the other, they have leverage to tank the whole thing and go to jail. This works provided both are about equally prepared to go to jail - so pick another fat 54-year-old. How old is creimer?
I read the article. Looks to me like he is getting off light. May only spend 4 years in jail. Only has to return 3 million. How much did he and his companions steal? Story gets vague at that point. There is probably enough to go around to let him off early don't you think? I only believe that you should believe half of what you hear and none of what you see..
There's a difference.
Killing someone or popping off a minimart isn't cheating the government out of taxes.
Rigging the lottery could impact lotto ticket sales which could cost the government millions in lost revenue from taking advantage of the poor and the weak.
Publicly flailing this guy for messing with the system builds confidence in the people that the government is out to protect their interests and guarantee their 1 in 292,201,338 (powerball) or as they say "The overall odds of winning a prize are 1 in 17.22" which means that since the vast majority of prizes is the cost of your ticket back, you would have to spend $17.22 to win $1.
I can't find ANYPLACE that explains Iowa State's Megamillions game play or odds. If they are similar to most others, then it's probably something like 1 in 7.1 million odds. The break-even chances are probably in the ballpark of 1 in 15 overall.
So that being said... the only people who would ever play this are people who are simply too stupid to figure out that that $5 a week they spend is really $260 a year or $5200 every 20 years which is a luxury cruise for two plus airfare when you retire. So, after 50 years of work, you can be guaranteed at least a little bit of the rich life... or you can pay the stupid tax and wonder why when you retire that you can't do those nice things.
The government will always punish harshly anyone who threatens their ability to tax the stupid.
the ball based ones are harder to rig and easier to test for loaded balls.
The balls can be manipulated in a lot more ways than loading them. Imperfect roundness, surface tension, expandability with temperature changes, vibration when exposed to ultrasounds - there are so many ways that are very hard to detect that may skew the odds of some balls being picked more often than others.
But you still have a computer that has all the sold tickets registered, at least with a checksum to prevent forgery, and that's a big fat target. It doesn't help much if the balls are random if the ticket system is vulnerable.
The balls can be manipulated in a lot more ways than loading them. Imperfect roundness, surface tension, expandability with temperature changes, vibration when exposed to ultrasounds
More difficult to do discretely. Even if you work in a position where you have access to the drawing machine and the balls, it's a lot more likely that some coworker notices you swapping balls with doctored balls. Not to mention the need to have them manufactured in such a way that they look exactly like the real balls. No off color, off smell, off sound when they bump, etc. And don't think about going to the same manufacturer as the original balls, he'd likely mention the strange order to your employer.
- there are so many ways that are very hard to detect that may skew the odds of some balls being picked more often than others.
... and this will show up on some simple statistical analysis.
Whereas by manipulating a computer-based PRNG, you could manipulate the numbers in such a way that not one number is more frequent than others, but that you could still calculate it if you knew the right formula.
Ingenious of you to randomly shuffle the letters so that only crypto-experts like me know what you're talking about!
ReaGaN.
Ezekiel 23:20
I'd hope they go pretty far to prevent that from happening.
1) Balls are cheap, so you keep a dozen sets of them, split into two pools, the use pool and the hold pool. A die is rolled to choose the set of balls used in the drawing. After the drawing, the die is rolled again and a hold pool box is put into the use pool and the recently used box of balls goes into the hold pool. This makes sure nobody knows which balls will get used and no way to keep a single set of balls in use consistently.
2) Balls are locked away and it takes 3 employees to work with them under video surveillance.
3) Frequent replacement of all ball sets.
4) Chain of custody for all balls from manufacturer to lottery.
This would make it really difficult to tamper with the balls or even know which balls would be used for any drawing or even how many times they might get used.
So that being said... the only people who would ever play this are people who are simply too stupid to figure out that that $5 a week they spend is really $260 a year or $5200 every 20 years which is a luxury cruise for two plus airfare when you retire. So, after 50 years of work, you can be guaranteed at least a little bit of the rich life... or you can pay the stupid tax and wonder why when you retire that you can't do those nice things.
I think you're leaving out the desperation factor. If you know for a fact the wealth you need to do anything substantial with your life is based on chance encounters, who you know and how well you can sell out others without getting caught and you have a reasonable assessment of your life while not being born into a billionaire family, you know that's not you. It's a case of 0% chance of ever achieving anything of note vs a 1-in-a-few-hundred-million chance. The lottery is infinitely better odds than zero.
We're talking about that most heinous of crimes: theft of money.
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In most states you can't take a large lottery prize anonymously, which he should have known.
True, but I believe there are tricks around that. A competent lawyer can create a trust and the trustee collects and manages the winnings on your behalf.
In a way I don't blame him; how did they let it come to the point that one person was able to game the system? Why didn't they have procedures in place to stop this? Or maybe why didn't they hold people who weren't directly involved accountable for not checking what this guy was doing? Easy to say in hindsight true but this wasn't on par with rigging a community raffle, there was MILLIONS of dollars involved.
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"If you're going to steal, steal big." -My Mom
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Lighten up. Looking at everything in life as a math formula or a calculated risk is boring. Some of my fondest memories were of doing things that probably weren't a very good idea.
Once the Lottery gets up this high, casual people start buying tickets, which really makes the jackpot jump. That's usually when I will buy a ticket, too. I realized the stupidity behind the a) chances of winning, and b) the fact that a shot at a mere 300 million isn't worthy of my $2. However, it does make a great escape, imagining yourself as one of the super-rich.
I'd say that $2 investment provides a much greater entertainment value, and discussion with my wife and friends, than does seeing half of the movies out there, to the tune of $10 each.
Also, have you ever tried to explain your logic to someone who won? I'm sure they'd love to hear how incredibly stupid they were. =D
RNG
Joe_Dragon was clearly using the French ordering. Randome Nombre généré .
So that being said... the only people who would ever play this are people who are simply too stupid to figure out that that $5 a week they spend is really $260 a year or $5200 every 20 years which is a luxury cruise for two plus airfare when you retire. So, after 50 years of work, you can be guaranteed at least a little bit of the rich life... or you can pay the stupid tax and wonder why when you retire that you can't do those nice things.
Here is what I disagree with on this part. I understand why you want to call those who play lottery stupid because majority of them wasted their money on it. However, would you still call those who won "stupid" too even though they may not know the maths you explained? Your maths shows that the risk is very high, and it is correct. But why do people still play? Because if they think that the reward is high enough for the gamble (subjective feeling), then they will play. Would that be called stupid? I don't think so unless they sold their house or put all their retirement funds on lottery and lost.
Theoretically, it is stupid to play unless you are on the winning side (which is very slim). However, I would call those who won stupid if they don't know how to manage the reward and spend it all without saving for their own retirement.
What he needed was a trusted accomplice.
Someone he could trust to play it straight while collecting the winnings and be fair about dividing up the spoils.
Have your agent do his/her thing, collect your share and play out your exit strategy.
Retire to an island somewhere.
And historically, this scheme hasn't been working very well because of human greed. Whoever is willing to be accomplice, the person is greedy. When the person sees that much money in hand, the person wants it all -- human nature. Very rare to see this scheme succeed...
1) Balls are cheap, so you keep a dozen sets of them, split into two pools, the use pool and the hold pool. A die is rolled to choose the set of balls used in the drawing. After the drawing, the die is rolled again and a hold pool box is put into the use pool and the recently used box of balls goes into the hold pool. This makes sure nobody knows which balls will get used and no way to keep a single set of balls in use consistently.
It's still a problem if the balls all come from the same manufacturer.
And, even if you manage to keep different sets, some of which are not bad, the bad ones are going to be used every now and then. That's enough to skew the results in the long run.
More difficult to do discretely. Even if you work in a position where you have access to the drawing machine and the balls, it's a lot more likely that some coworker notices you swapping balls with doctored balls.
Exploits like these are more likely to happen at the manufacturing side. (Just like with slot machines and voting machines, but I repeat myself.)
... and this will show up on some simple statistical analysis.
There aren't enough drawings performed for a skew to be statistically significant. That, say, the number 8 is picked twice as often as the number 17 in 100 drawings is not in itself alarming. It would be more alarming if the distribution was too uniform.
If it succeeded, we wouldn't know.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
If it succeeded, we wouldn't know.
Right. But human nature usually urges them to brag or disclose to someone else. Still not easy to keep secret. So it is still rare...
I wouldn't bet on it being all that rare. This definitely falls under white collar crime, which gets a lot less press coverage and consequentially less funding, than violent street crime. Just look at the numbers for bank robberies from the FBI. The last time I looked in a good year the FBI was only able to identify half of the suspects. That doesn't even equate to catching half of the suspects. Bank Robberies are unlikely to not be reported as the FBI is responsible for them, and so you can bet that the numbers are pretty accurate. Banks are aware of the danger of being robbed and so have lots of cameras and usually armed guards on the premise. Robbing a bank is usually viewed as being a high risk venture even by the criminals themselves. So you have a kind of crime where the odds of getting busted are relatively high, but still only a 50% chance of being identified. I think that says a lot for the odds of getting away with white collar crimes, and especially when the fact that a crime was committed might not ever be realized.
It would seem to be a self re-enforcing myth that people can't keep their mouths shut about crimes they've committed. In white collar crime it is highly likely that a person or organization wouldn't even realize they had been victimized. So law enforcement can only make guesses as to how much of it there is and the low hanging fruit that is easiest to catch is going to be the criminals that couldn't keep their mouth shut.
This is similar to the low homicide rate, and insanely high closure rate for homicides in Japan. You could choose to believe that Japan just has much less lethal crime and that the police are magically more effective. Or you could notice that if a case doesn't appear to be open and shut, it won't be ruled a homicide. And on top of that attempted homicides are counted as homicides for reporting purposes while robbery homicides aren't.
> But human nature usually urges them to brag or disclose to someone else.
Does it?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."