18 ms·
Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison
- socalnate1 9y agoHow could you possibly believe you would get away with something like this.
- DINKDINK 9y agoPeople overestimate over estimate possible improbable odds and underestimate near certain odds. Much the same way the mental processes enjoy playing the lottery. See Possibility Effect, Certainty Effect
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- crb002 9y agoThe Iowa Attorney General was so incompetent in the digital forensics they barely convicted him the first trial. Only after did they figure out how he did it.
- defen 9y agoIs there an explanation somewhere of the technical details of how he did it?
- mvidal01 9y agoI found something here - https://www.casino.org/news/eddie-tipton-lottery-fraudster-reveal-methods-return-plea-deal https://www.casino.org/news/eddie-tipton-lottery-fraudster-r...
- albinofrenchy 9y ago> Investigators who examined the random number generator for the Wisconsin random number generator concluded it contained two extra bits of coding that instructed it to produce Tipton’s numbers on just three days of the year. Super unfortunate wording. I spent a second wondering how you could encode that much precision in two 'bits'. This seems like a good case for open source; and pay bounties for anything untoward. I really am curious what the code looks like for this.
- dan000892 9y agoThe firm who investigated presented at DEFCON this year. Here's the PDF. https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2025/DEF%20CON%2025%20presentations/DEFCON-25-Gus-Frischie-and-Evan-Teitelman-Backdooring-the-Lottery.pdf https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2025/DEF%20CON%2025%20pre...
- tlb 9y agoHe started in 2005 and the investigation started in 2015, so he did get away with it for 10 years. He probably could have won a few, stopped, and gotten away with it if he'd been less greedy. The code was clever, generating predictable numbers on a few particular days of the year. And it must have been subtle, to survive 10 years of nobody else noticing.
- jstanley 9y agoMakes you wonder how many people do get away with things like this without anybody realising.
- pessimizer 9y agoMost criminals get away with most crimes. 40% of murders go unsolved.
- chiliap2 9y agoWouldn't that mean they don't get away with most murders?
- heedlessly2 9y agosome deaths that are marked as accidents and suicides are actually murders
- mrleiter 9y agoThe investigation started in 2010, so five years. But still, five years is a lot.
- mythrwy 9y agoRelated question: how many people have gotten away with things like this that we have no knowledge of?
- frandroid 9y agoLet's start the betting on the answers...
- c3534l 9y agoThis guy got away with it for 5 years. The only other one I know of is the McDonald's Monopoly guy who rigged it for 4 years. This tells me you can get away with it for a while, repeatedly. And I really doubt most people would take a huge payout, then keep working that job to do it again. So I suspect that it takes 4 or 5 years to get caught and we're just catching the minority of people greedy enough to keep their scam going for years, despite the massive amounts of money they've accumulated already.
- weaksauce 9y agosmart enough to pull it off but dumb enough to think that having your brother win a $14,000,000 prize is not suspicious and wouldn't be investigated... that's impressive.
- sushid 9y agoIt wasn't his brother. But it was a friend who lived in Texas that tried to claim the Iowa lottery winnings.
- logfromblammo 9y agoEven the stupid lizard criminal portion of my brain tells me that you never set yourself up to win the jackpot. You take the third place prize. But even then, you need a plausible reason to be cashing in so many winning tickets, so you also spend some of your guaranteed winnings on losing tickets, and also buy a bunch that will break even. That 3rd-place prize is less suspicious if you're also cashing in 1000 $2 winners at the same time, and putting it all into a "Lottery Buyer's Club LLC" account. It's the Superman III principle. You can steal as many half-pennies as you can haul away in a truck, but if you take even one $10000 note, someone is going to notice.
- huebnerob 9y agoEspecially with a frankly embarrassingly poor attempt to place distance between himself and the payouts. He picked his own brother and a close family friend? Might as well have walked up to his boss every other week with a spot of feigned surprise and a new jackpot winning ticket to cash out, figuring they could direct deposit it along with his paycheck. Really makes you wonder how many moderately intelligent people out there are successfully running schemes like this and just never arouse suspicion.
- lazerpants 9y agoAs a thought exercise, what do you think the minimum distance between the cheater and the payout would need to be in order to avoid detection?
- TearsInTheRain 9y agoat minimum a bacon number of 2
- nasredin 9y agoAKA Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon
- bluGill 9y agoHigh enough that you can't fully trust the guy getting the payout to share. If someone you just vaguely know made you an offer to get this payout would you accept it or turn them in? Most of us reading this make enough money that we can afford to be honest in cases like this, so it is a moral question only - are you really dishonest enough to cheat?
- 0xfeba 9y agoYeah I'd accept that, without much hesitation.
- twothamendment 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rdtsc 9y ago> "It's difficult even saying that with all the people that I know behind me that I hurt." It is interesting to think about who he considers he hurt. The potential winners who relied on lottery winning to secure a future for their families? The lottery workers? He is a criminal surely, but isn't the whole lottery system a tax on lack of education and it just gives false hope to people and encourages gambling. He reduced faith in it somehow being a random lottery so I guess he probably hurt the state income bottom line. At least in some states they claim to use lottery proceeding to improve math education - not sure how truthful that is.
- SirFatty 9y agoLotto in Illinois was introduced as a way to help pay for public education. You can guess how that ended up... hell, they were not even paying the winners for a while (maybe they still are not).
- derekp7 9y agoThe lottery does pay for education. And the pre-existing education funds were removed. Net gain in funding: 0.
- koolba 9y agoKind of funny how that works when money is fungible eh? Same thing happened, and continues to happen, with tobacco tax dollars.
- SirFatty 9y agoCorrect, here's a pretty good explanation. It's crazy really. https://www.wbez.org/shows/curious-city/why-the-illinois-lotterys-been-no-jackpot-for-schools/72a184e8-f0b7-4f0e-b2e0-3ff4313bffed https://www.wbez.org/shows/curious-city/why-the-illinois-lot...
- jrs235 9y agoNot only is Illinois not paying winners, they're aren't selling Powerball or Mega Millions or any multi-state lottery game. http://wgntv.com/2017/06/27/powerball-mega-millions-ticket-sales-to-be-suspended-prize-payments-delayed/ http://wgntv.com/2017/06/27/powerball-mega-millions-ticket-s...
- akulbe 9y ago.
- kadenshep 9y agoMoney represents time and resources. He can't exactly restore those either.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dminor 9y ago> The prosecutor said Tipton will serve no more than five years, if he behaves and makes parole.
- icebraining 9y agoReading the title I agreed, but consider that his lawyer says he expects him to serve only three or four years, so it's not that bad.
- wolco 9y agoA lot can happen. If the punishment should be 5 years give him five years why the 25 years / life sentence
- icebraining 9y agoFor reasons that escape me, what they did violate the law in three states; Iowa, Wisconsin and Colorado. They signed a multi-state plea agreement, probably to avoid being convicted three times. https://www.doj.state.wi.us/sites/default/files/news-media/6.12.17_Tipton_PleaAgreement.pdf https://www.doj.state.wi.us/sites/default/files/news-media/6...
- akulbe 9y agoKinda discouraging to make what would seem like a completely REASONABLE and VALID comment, and get downvoted. What's the point?! That's why I removed it.
- mundo 9y ago> The prosecutor said Tipton will serve no more than five years, if he behaves and makes parole. Well at least he didn't sell drugs. Slightly relevant story: A few years ago I was visiting China and my colleagues there were discussing a city official who had just been found guilty of embezzling tens of millions of dollars from the local government (which is more or less what this guy did). Me: "How much time did he get?" Them: "Three days." Me: "In prison?" Them: "To live."
- tptacek 9y agoThe median sentence for sale of narcotics (state charges, like the lotto fixer) is less than three years. In some jurisdictions the average drug sale sentence is less than a year.
- komali2 9y agoLast I checked they still did firing line executions in China occasionally.
- odiroot 9y agoThey just wanted to make an example out of him. Usually these frauds get sent to minimal security prisons or are under house arrests. But they're burned from doing business forever afterwards.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- humonga 9y agoTime to switch over to provably fair lotteries!
- soared 9y agoLike with some sort of cryptocurrency...? There is an ICO next week for this! /s
- ttoinou 9y agoYeah ! Actually, Vitalik Buterin in conferences gives this precise example of crypto-lottery as a good example of what we could create with blockchain :)
- syrrim 9y agoThis is actually a hard problem. In order to be provable, you have to be deterministic (i.e. you can't leave the RNG as a black box). However you can't let any individual (nor any conspiring individuals, think Sybil attacks) predict the result, nor have any control over the result (except perhaps to disqualify themselves).
- aianus 9y agoThis was somewhat of a solved problem with sites like Satoshi Dice. They could still cheat but everyone would find out the next day and stop playing.
- syrrim 9y agoSatoshi Dice seems to solve the problem between two players. This is a much easier problem than 3 or more player. With 3 or more players, you have to worry about other players colluding with each other to increase their chances unfairly.
- leni536 9y agoWhat about this scheme? This week's random number is the concatenation of three cryptographic signatures of last week's random number. The three private keys are kept in different places on cryptographic tokens and they are guarded. Lottery numbers are drawn by a deterministic algorithm using the week's random number as seed. In the case of a compromise of a single private key it can be revoked and replaced by the signature of the two other keys. I'm not a cryptographer, maybe this scheme is flawed in some way that I can't immediately see.
- upofadown 9y agoAnyone know why these lotteries stopped using the traditional bingo ball machines in favour of a black box?
- riazrizvi 9y agoHarder to control?
- LeoPanthera 9y agoPerhaps somewhat ironically they thought balls were easier to rig.
- indolering 9y agoWhere did you see this? Everything I read on it made it seem like they were lazy and just didn't want to have to manually run another ball lottery.
- Phlarp 9y agoI think this is a really worthwhile question. Is there some inherent flaw with the randomness of the older style bingo ball machines? Surely the upkeep and maintenance of a few ball tumbling machines is far cheaper than software developers and datacenter costs. Even the fancier air driven ball bouncing designs seem massively less complex and easier to manage long term than a software solution.
- jmharvey 9y agoIt's a cost reduction measure. Maintaining a physical machine and conducting drawings of balls takes a fair amount of labor.
- tuna-piano 9y agoIt's really telling when computer experts are the ones most scared ahout electronic voting, software lotteries, etc. Even the best BitCoin experts seem to recommend burying your bitcoin key in you yard or storing it on paper at the bank.
- ransom1538 9y agoOk. Do these guys that commit white collar crime not know how a passport works? If you have millions of dollars stashed in bank accounts WHY are you in the US? Why are you buying estates and testing out a new bmwI8 and spilling champagne all over? Why not get on a plane go to Morocco (a country with an extremely complex extradition process)? wtf. Even the guy running silk road was hanging out in SF now lives in a 4x6 concrete cube - instead why not hang out with Edward Snowden in a Russian bar or whatever. This guy for example the FBI calls just to chat. They can't touch him. http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2009/11/felon_shares_inside_story_of_o.html http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2009/11/felon_share...
- arcanus 9y agoI've also always wondered this. But people seldom run. I think Snowden had seen enough of the sausage being made to realize that hiding in the USA was impossible, given the security apparatus' capabilities.
- notfromhere 9y agoGiven that he defected to Moscow, staying in the US wasn't an option
- pseingatl 9y agoSnowden didn't defect. He was on his way to Venezuela, which had granted him asylum. The US canceled his passport, stranding him in Russia. Even though the Venezuelan Air Force has an Airbus, flying to Russia non-stop was not feasible--Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, had his plane forced down on the suspicion that Snowden was aboard. Still, if Putin wanted to get Snowden to Venezuela, all he had to do was put him aboard a Russian nuclear submarine. In ten days, Snowden would be in Maiquetia with no risk of interference. As it turns out, Russia is probably a safer place for Snowden than today's Venezuela.
- wbl 9y agoIf Venezuela was willing to let him travel there they could have issued him documentation to do so.
- pseingatl 9y agoIf you can hack different lotteries in multiple states, how hard can it be to hack voting machines? You can't count on a complicated extradition process to prevent extradition. With an Interpol Red Notice, travel is difficult. There's informal extradition as well, as El Chapo found out. His Mexican cases were still on appeal when he was shipped north. Florida lawyer Scott Rothstein fled to Morocco, turned around and came home. Still, there are exceptions. France will not extradite its citizens for any reason, in part because of the Holocaust. This keeps Roman Polanski safe. Italy will not extradite its citizens either. Nor will Israel.
- Mz 9y agoSo, have they not watched Die Hard? The point made in that movie is that when you steal this many millions, they will find you -- unless they think you are already dead (thus, the plot to blow the building and look like they all died in the process). What were these fools thinking?
- shellbackground 9y agoUsing movies as basis for decision is even worse.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- BackPropagate 9y agoHe only regrets it because he got caught.
- mrep 9y agoDo these people not do code and/or security reviews? The random number generator for a lottery seems like the most important part and should be heavily audited.
- bluedino 9y agoIt is a bit amazing when you think that on average, there is a new millionaire (or even multi-millionaire) made by the different lotteries in the USA every day
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoYeah I think there is so much focus on the JACKPOT that people totally miss how many millionaires are made at every drawing. I think it is interesting to say the least.
- whipoodle 9y agoIt would be interesting to know the rate at which they subsequently fall out of that status.
- LeifCarrotson 9y agoI think it's even more amazing to consider that for every winner of a 1 million dollar prize, about 1.4 million dollars is taken from other people, mostly those who can't afford it. Not to mention that the winner will be subject to 25-75% taxation, depending on their state, whether they take the lump sum option, how they spend the money, etc. It's even worse because the people who are most harmed by the psychology of the lottery - gambling addictions, insidious advertising, and false promises - are the most ardent supporters of it, because they are mislead to believe it gives them hope to get out of their poverty when really it only chains them more strongly to it. It's shameful. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/lotteries-americas-70-billion-shame/392870/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/lotteri...
- Rjevski 9y agoI'm not saying this person is innocent, but 25 years for something that didn't hurt anyone is way excessive. This sentence would be more appropriate for murderers, and yet some of them get way less.
- qq66 9y agoOne of the principles of tort law is that the penalty should account for the likelihood of getting caught. If your nuclear power plant melts down, punitive damages will be low, since there's no way you could have ever covered it up, and the plant will typically pay mostly compensatory damages for direct harms. For a tort where you expect that thousands of people have done it without getting caught, the punitive damages are very high so that the overall calculus for a prospective criminal becomes net negative expected value. That's not a principle of criminal law in the US but often becomes part of the sentence extrajudicially.
- jernfrost 9y agoPointless though as that is not how humans really assess risk. England tried thisin the 1700s or so. Replacing cops with harsh penalties. Did not work, punishment levels kept going up without any affect on crime
- qq66 9y agoIt may be how companies assess risk, especially family-owned businesses, which is probably why it's remained in tort law.
- mynameishere 9y agoSeems like he hurt every single person who played the game without cheating, to an aggregate of millions of dollars. Seems like 25 years is extraordinarily generous. If he picked 10,000 pockets or robbed 1000 banks he would get life in prison, and deserve it.
- jernfrost 9y agoWow American sentences are out of this world. You get less than that for mass murder in Norway.
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoI didn't understand the State here, who did he harm? "All the people that were harmed", what does that mean?
- dennisgorelik 9y agoEddie Tipton tarnished lottery's reputation. The State milks lottery (taxes) and therefore loses financially if lottery reputation is tarnished.
- eljimmy 9y ago> Tipton's lawyer said he expects his client will serve three to four years before being released. Far from the 25 years mentioned in the headline...
- AliAdams 9y agoI'd love to know what he actually did. You'd think with what is at stake, the lottery would have some serious security measures in place to stop someone doing an obfuscated if(date=x) return [12,34,5,6,7]; or messing with the RNG.
- timboisvert 9y agoAnyone have details on how exactly he did it, and how he got caught? I'm not a lottery player but I'm intrigued by the fact that one state had refused to pay him because they thought it was fraudulent. What was their cue?
- throwawaymanbot 9y agoSomeone rigs a Lottery.... gets 25 years.. Someone crashes the stock exchange and causes a global financial meltdown.. Crickets....
- renas 9y agoThis is the reason the lottery should be run by a smart contract in Ethereum for example, like https://lifelottery.github.io/ https://lifelottery.github.io/