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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

#181

Post by ZephyrP »

chowells wrote: post #143
InitialLastName wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buy index funds and live off the proceeds?

I don't know about you, but I can't live off the proceeds from $10 in index funds. Not even if repeated 100 times.

The general principle here is right, but I was kind of curious about exactly what your gains would be.

I curled the last 90 days from http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3021-gainnyse-gainer... and if you selected the largest percentage gainer every day for the past 100 days, given you started with $10, you'd have about 828 million after 90 days. (It's worth noting however with 2,800 stocks on the NYSE, that 2800^100 is much longer odds than winning the lottery. Actually, your odds of selected the very highest percentage stock gainer three days in a row are lower than your odds of winning the powerball, assuming such a thing is random).

Unrelated, this has really been a winning quarter for logistics and trucking companies!

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

#182

Post by edgartaor »

rdtsc wrote: post #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 redu…

>some states they claim to use lottery proceeding to improve math education

About that, this video is worth watching. No that is 100% true, but good enough to start a conversation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PK-netuhHA

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

#183

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

vertex-four wrote: post #85
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…

True, there's a population which overspends on lottery tickets. But those people would also be spending their money on other pleasures otherwise - the solution there is increased social care and responsibility for these people, rather than taking the lottery away from the many people who play it responsibly. Also, that article may be very wrong - at least one other news article which would appear to reference the sam…

> But those people would also be spending their money on other pleasures otherwise

That's a pretty tall claim to make. Do you have any sources to back it up? Especially because if these people were putting money into savings instead with proper education it could make a significant path to getting out of poverty.

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

#184

Post by kamaal »

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…

Its not just with fraud, its with anything that comes for free. Sometimes also called luck.

The general idea is if you are lucky, you will be lucky enough all life. And the party will never end.

Its only when it stops you realize that you could have saved up and moved on long back.

You can't have the whole world.

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

#185

Post by kamaal »

ZephyrP wrote: post #181
chowells wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about you, but I can't live off the proceeds from $10 in index funds. Not even if repeated 100 times.

The general principle here is right, but I was kind of curious about exactly what your gains would be. I curled the last 90 days from http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3021-gainnyse-gainer... and if you selected the largest percentage gainer every day for the past 100 days, given you started with $10, you'd have about 828 million after 90 days. (It's worth noting however with 2,800 stocks on the NYSE, that 2800…

>>if you selected the largest percentage gainer every day for the past 100 days, given you started with $10, you'd have about 828 million after 90 days.

This is lottery by very definition.

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

#186

Post by indolering »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #40
upofadown wrote: post #30

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

Perhaps somewhat ironically they thought balls were easier to rig.

Where 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.

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

#187

Post by Bootvis »

wbl wrote: post #178
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please read the post you're responding to again.

The cancellation had no effect on the ability of Venezuela or Russia to permit him to travel.

The part where the plane was forced to land.

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

#188

Post by qq66 »

jernfrost wrote: post #159
qq66 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It may be how companies assess risk, especially family-owned businesses, which is probably why it's remained in tort law.

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

#189

Post by albinofrenchy »

cm2187 wrote: post #112
School-Cotton wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not talking about terrorists or Nazis here. Do you really think we'd be sending Seal Team Six to get some guy who scammed the lottery? He didn't even catch federal charges.

Against a Madoff perhaps, yes. But the point is rather that the FBI probably doesn't need to respect the rules outside of the US.

If you aren't a threat to lives on american soil, there is no amount of financial crime that will earn you extraordinary rendition. It isn't worth the diplomatic relations, nor the risk of life for the people who would be grabbing you.

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

#190

Post by albinofrenchy »

mvidal01 wrote: post #130
defen wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I found something here - https://www.casino.org/news/eddie-tipton-lottery-fraudster-r...

> 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.

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