Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison
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Re: Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison
#2How could you possibly believe you would get away with something like this.
Re: Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison
#3How could you possibly believe you would get away with something like this.
People 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
Re: Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison
#4How could you possibly believe you would get away with something like this.
The 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.
Re: Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison
#5How could you possibly believe you would get away with something like this.
He 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.
Re: Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison
#6How could you possibly believe you would get away with something like this.
Related question: how many people have gotten away with things like this that we have no knowledge of?
Re: Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison
#7> "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.
Re: Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison
#8How could you possibly believe you would get away with something like this.
He 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.
Makes you wonder how many people do get away with things like this without anybody realising.
Re: Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison
#9> "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 redu…
Lotto 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).
Re: Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison
#10How could you possibly believe you would get away with something like this.
smart 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.