Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code
February 2nd, 2011Via: Wired:
As a trained statistician with degrees from MIT and Stanford University, Srivastava was intrigued by the technical problem posed by the lottery ticket. In fact, it reminded him a lot of his day job, which involves consulting for mining and oil companies. A typical assignment for Srivastava goes like this: A mining company has multiple samples from a potential gold mine. Each sample gives a different estimate of the amount of mineral underground. “My job is to make sense of those results,” he says. “The numbers might seem random, as if the gold has just been scattered, but they’re actually not random at all. There are fundamental geologic forces that created those numbers. If I know the forces, I can decipher the samples. I can figure out how much gold is underground.”
Srivastava realized that the same logic could be applied to the lottery. The apparent randomness of the scratch ticket was just a facade, a mathematical lie. And this meant that the lottery system might actually be solvable, just like those mining samples. “At the time, I had no intention of cracking the tickets,” he says. He was just curious about the algorithm that produced the numbers. Walking back from the gas station with the chips and coffee he’d bought with his winnings, he turned the problem over in his mind. By the time he reached the office, he was confident that he knew how the software might work, how it could precisely control the number of winners while still appearing random.
…
Furthermore, the Massachusetts lottery has a history of dispensing large payouts to suspected criminals, at least in one Mass Millions game. In 1991, James “Whitey” Bulger, a notorious South Boston mob boss currently on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list—he’s thought to be the inspiration for the Frank Costello character in The Departed—and three others cashed in a winning lottery ticket worth $14.3 million. He collected more than $350,000 before his indictment.
At the time, authorities thought Bulger was using the lottery to launder money: take illicit profits, buy a share in a winning lottery ticket, redeem it, and end up with clean cash. In this respect, the lottery system seems purpose-built for organized crime, says Michael Plichta, unit chief of the FBI’s organized crime section. “When I was working in Puerto Rico, I watched all these criminals use traditional lottery games to clean their money,” he remembers. “You’d bring these drug guys in, and you’d ask them where their income came from, how they could afford their mansion even though they didn’t have a job, and they’d produce all these winning lottery tickets. That’s when I began to realize that they were using the games to launder cash.”
The problem for the criminals, of course, is that unless cracked, most lotteries return only about 53 cents on the dollar, which means that they’d be forfeiting a significant share of their earnings. But what if criminals aren’t playing the lottery straight? What if they have a method that, like Srivastava’s frequency-of-occurrence trick, can dramatically increase the odds of winning? As Srivastava notes, if organized crime had a system that could identify winning tickets more than 65 percent of the time, then the state-run lottery could be turned into a profitable form of money laundering. “You’ve got to realize that, for people in organized crime, making piles of money is one of their biggest problems,” says Charles Johnston, a supervisory special agent in the organized crime section of the FBI. “If they could find a way to safely launder money without taking too big a loss, then I can guarantee you they’d start doing it in a heartbeat.” There is no direct evidence that criminals are actually using these government-run gambling games to hide their crimes. But the circumstantial evidence, as noted by the FBI, is certainly troubling.
And then there’s Joan Ginther, who has won more than $1 million from the Texas Lottery on four different occasions. She bought two of the winners from the same store in Bishop, Texas. What’s strangest of all, perhaps, is that three of Ginther’s wins came from scratch tickets with baited hooks and not from Mega Millions or Powerball. Last June, Ginther won $10 million from a $50 ticket, which is the largest scratch prize ever awarded by the Texas Lottery.
Perhaps Ginther is simply the luckiest person on earth. (She has refused almost all requests from journalists for comment.) While the lotteries are extremely rigorous about various aspects of security, from the integrity of the latex to the cashing of tickets at stores, the industry appears to have not considered the possibility of plundering the games using the visible numbers on the ticket. For instance, when I contacted the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries, their security experts couldn’t recall having heard of Mohan Srivastava or the broken Ontario games. This is one of the largest trade associations of lotteries in the world, and it had no recollection that at least a few of its games had been proven to be fatally flawed.
I thought casinos would be the most likely choice for laundering?
…
Skycity auckland is mafia btw I have an italian friend working there who overhears things…
I am going to read this article again during daylight hours when I can make more sense of it. Can’t tell how many of these scratch cards I’ve bought. Used to spend about $20 per week in the hope I could quit my day job and be at home with Mom! Quit doing that!
When the lottery first started in Virginia in the early ’80’s my dear friend called it the “poor man’s tax.” The statistics in this article point to the same conclusion. If its a rigged system? What a “nice” way to screw your poor people even more. What a clusterfluck. Rigging the system, and then relying on desperate folk who have no other vision of a way out of their desparate poverty, and then screwing them just to do what exactly?
In PA the Gaming Commission justifies this by saying that “all profits go to elderly programs.”
Right. The elderly Mafia, I guess.
This is some weird science. Used to know someone who I went to school with who was working on the math of probability for a gambling scenario in a certain city in the U.S. who wanted to set up a gambling regime. Holy crap. Don’t think this person would ever have gone along with a rigged system.
Going to have to write to the Auditor General in my state and send this article. I think its awesome. And I’m not going to buy scratch cards all in one place. Thanks, Kevin.