Posted on 12/21/2015 7:17:58 AM PST by jalisco555
DES MOINES, Iowa — The allegations read like a movie plot: a lottery industry insider installs undetectable software giving him advance knowledge of winning numbers, then enlists accomplices to play those numbers and collect the jackpots. And they secretly enrich themselves for years — until a misstep exposes them.
Eddie Tipton, former security director of the Multi-State Lottery Association, has been convicted of fraud for fixing one jackpot in Des Moines, but prosecutors say his high-tech scheme extended far beyond Iowa. He’s accused of tampering with lottery drawings in four states over six years, and investigators are expanding their inquiry nationwide.
Investigators have asked states to review jackpots produced by the number-generators Tipton had access to, and whose winning numbers were specifically requested by the ticket buyer. They hope to talk with anyone aware of such payouts being collected by someone other than the person who ends up with the money, said Rob Sand, a state prosecutor in Des Moines who is leading the probe.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
If they rigged lottery, why not slots?
Pittsburgh was first with Triple 6 Nick.
...or voting machines.
Good point! I trusted our old mechanical voting machines and they worked fine.
Slots have always been rigged to pay out some percentage (less than 100, of course) of whatever is fed into them.
But, but, the money was just sitting there ...
Paper ballots are best of all.
But randomly.
Then, of course, the casinos decide that a slot has malfunctioned when some poor schlub hits the jackpot, and they give him nothing, except maybe a free meal.
New York State Lottery officials were overheard remarking, “Hey, you never know!”
Presumably. But now that they're all essentially networked computers who knows for sure?
Slots are rigged at the mainframe level. That’s why the big jackpots at the Indian casinos are always a ‘machine malfunction’. But it would seem to be harder to have your associate get on the right machine at the right time for the payoff if you were trying to deliver a jackpot from the central computer. Easier to rig them to not pay off a jackpot at all.
Should give us some idea what electronic voting is subject to.
Hey! Don’t forget to give these “tickets” out as Christmas presents. Spread the joy... I say.
Don’t they have balls ?
Investigators initially suspected the buyer was merely trying to hide the winnings from a former spouse or creditor. Still, who would walk away from $16.5 million?
The case took an even more dramatic twist after authorities sought the public's help, releasing surveillance video showing a stocky, hooded man buying the winning ticket and hot dogs at a service station in December 2010. Lottery colleagues were stunned, stepping forward to say the man looked and sounded like Tipton.
Stupid greed exposed him.
I liked the slots in overseas officers’ clubs. They were set to give-back 93%.
Big lotteries use non-computer methods of generating winning numbers. This guy was an insider who exploited a security weakness in computer-picked winning numbers, which were used only in the some games with lesser prizes, but still big enough to take a risk.
I’d guess insiders with political ties pull pull scams more commonly in the few states that allow jackpot winners to be anonymous.
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