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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

#151
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.

Dont forget tax!

Try:

$ echo "(93250.1)+(13000-9325)0.15"|bc

gives tax payments on 13k USD to IRS 1483.75

9% of take home pay is

$ echo "(13000-((93250.1)+(13000-9325)0.15))*0.09"|bc 1035

Then there is the additional sales tax at point of sale, which can further reduce buying power.

Yes its 135 than your projection, but that might be food for the week.

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

#152
post #87

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…

When a country really wants to get you, there aren't many safe places in the world. The terrorist Carlos got abducted by the French intelligence service. Eichmann by the Israeli services. There are less famous cases (like the Kalinka Bamberski case). What's interesting in that in all of those cases, these illegal means of grabbing the suspect abroad didn't invalidate the case against him and in all of those examples…

All barriers are deterrents. Whatever crime you committed, the authorities are going to be equally or less likely to arrest you if doing so is more expensive and more difficult. They'll spend billions or trillions to get Osama Bin Laden but for a lottery scammer they might give up.

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

#153

I'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.

One 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.

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

#154

It 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

Yeah 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.

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

#157
post #80
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there an explanation somewhere of the technical details of how he did it?

The firm who investigated presented at DEFCON this year. Here's the PDF.

https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2025/DEF%20CON%2025%20pre...

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

#158
post #91

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…

Ok if the goal is to give people hope, just allocate a fund every 3 months from the state and enter everyone who is reported a tax income less than poverty level in the pool. And there it is, automatic hope and dreams for a while for all that state's poor. The lottery though is not hurting a middle class programmer who buys a ticket for fun, it is hurting the poor who possibly don't realize how unlikely it for them t…

I've recently moved to Chicago and two things I have noticed: what I can only assume are relatively lower income people buying incredible amounts of lottery tickets, expensive scratch offs at that. And chicken wing bones one the sidewalks.

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

#159
post #153

I'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.

One 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 damag…

Pointless 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

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

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's true that this was bipartisan amongst elected officials, and strangely to me, a number of liberal people in my native DC area that I still talk to. I think there were varying degrees though. Do you think Trump would have let Manning go for example? I'm not sure that even Hillary would have. And yet Obama did, eventually. Also, there is little doubt in my mind that mutual hate of Hillary brought together WikiLeak…

> you think Trump would have let Manning go for example? I'm not sure that even Hillary would have.

Of course not, I'm just trying to dispel the myth that the world is in black and white. You can't just hold the 'other' party accountable. We need to look in the mirror.

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