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Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison

money.cnn.com

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Re: Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison

#101

Post by jlgaddis »

froindt wrote: post #60
vertex-four wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ehh. A $1/week expense which buys you hope and dreams for a week isn't that bad in the grand scheme of things. It's certainly cheaper than cigarettes, alcohol, or drugs to temporarily take the stress out of the fact that you're in a long-term shitty situation with little way out of it. This concept that the poor should only ever work, eat, and sleep, and any attempt to look after their mental health is wasting money,…

> Ehh. A $1/week expense which buys you hope and dreams for a week isn't that bad in the grand scheme of things. The problem is that poor people aren't just dropping 1 dollar per week. They're spending much more. Some people have a very poor grasp of how bad the odds are and mention that playing the lottery is their way to retirement. Taking a convenient top link from a Google search (admittedly it references a study…

From the linked article:

> ... poor households, with annual take-home incomes under $13,000, on average, spend $645 a year on lottery tickets, which comes to about 9% of their yearly income..

  $ echo 13000*.09|bc
  1170.00
$645 is ~5% of 13k.

Re: Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison

#102

Post by tuna-piano »

upofadown wrote: post #30

Anyone know why these lotteries stopped using the traditional bingo ball machines in favour of a black box?

It'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.

Re: Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison

#103

Post by chaostheory »

metalliqaz wrote: post #89
notfromhere wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that he defected to Moscow, staying in the US wasn't an option

Crazy that people still believe this stupid lie, easily debunked by 30 seconds on Wikipedia. Even crazier is that the people who really wanted to string Snowden up by the neck were the conservatives, because they love law enforcement and are willing to give up freedom in order to fight Islamic terrorism. In other words, supporting Big Brother despite ostensibly wanting less government. Crazier still is that those sam…

> Even crazier is that the people who really wanted to string Snowden up by the neck were the conservatives

I strongly feel that this had bipartisan support across the aisles. Obama supported it, despite his pledge to protect whistle blowers. Hillary was no different.

Re: Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison

#105

Post by mikeash »

ransom1538 wrote: post #53

Ok. 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…

I think they don't know when to stop. Fleeing the country would put an end to their criminal career, and they continue to see dollar signs. By the time they realize that the authorities will put a stop to it anyway, it's too late.

Re: Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison

#106

Post by mikeash »

jlgaddis wrote: post #101
froindt wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ehh. A $1/week expense which buys you hope and dreams for a week isn't that bad in the grand scheme of things. The problem is that poor people aren't just dropping 1 dollar per week. They're spending much more. Some people have a very poor grasp of how bad the odds are and mention that playing the lottery is their way to retirement. Taking a convenient top link from a Google search (admittedly it references a study…

From the linked article: > ... poor households, with annual take-home incomes under $13,000, on average, spend $645 a year on lottery tickets, which comes to about 9% of their yearly income.. $ echo 13000*.09|bc 1170.00 $645 is ~5% of 13k.

Note the word "under."

Re: Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison

#107

Post by rev_null »

tlb wrote: post #5
socalnate1 wrote: post #2

How 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.

He would have gotten away with it, if it weren't for those pesky kids.

Re: Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison

#108

Post by icebraining »

AcerbicZero wrote: post #78
temp-dude-87844 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I support the idea that lottery and gambling is for 'entertainment purposes only', if one never buys into the lottery, they can never obtain the winnings. Buying exactly one ticket per drawing at least places one in the pool of potential winners, despite the odds being rather long. Although the expected value is still minuscule, it's an unquantifiable improvement (since we can't divide by zero). And before you…

I think the problem people have with the lottery isn't directed at the middle class person buying a lottery ticket here and there. It's more that the whole system is designed to encourage already vulnerable people to risk somewhat significant portions of their weekly take home on the extremely unlikely chance of winning, and then doing this week in and week out. $2/$3 for a Powerball, maybe a state lotto ticket, then…

Spain in the 19th century tried to avoid that by massively increasing the ticket price (even now, it's still 200€ per full ticket). It didn't work, people just pooled their money and bought "shares" of a ticket.

Re: Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison

#109

Post by ttoinou »

soared wrote: post #36
humonga wrote: post #25

Time to switch over to provably fair lotteries!

Like with some sort of cryptocurrency...? There is an ICO next week for this! /s

Yeah ! Actually, Vitalik Buterin in conferences gives this precise example of crypto-lottery as a good example of what we could create with blockchain :)

Re: Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison

#110

Post by syrrim »

humonga wrote: post #25

Time to switch over to provably fair lotteries!

This 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).
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