Here’s the apparent backstory regarding the lottery fraud that’s in the news this week. The short version is that a lottery official participated in a scheme to make the computer system print the winning ticket for someone - either himself, or a co-conspirator, it’s all bit confusing.
The really confusing thing for me is this: how can the computer print the winning ticket before the drawing has taken place? Isn’t the drawing done by physically pulling numbered balls from a tumbler?
Apparently they don’t use those numbered balls anymore but instead a random number generator.
More details here:
Well anyway he had to produce a fake ticket.
But as the only strong evidence is that he changed the security system to only record at one minute intervals, the only reason to do that would be to get at the random number generator, he made it generate his numbers… but he couldn’t cash the ticket since he is an employee. No one else wanted to get involved since they thought they’d get busted… how did they buy the ticket, where ? What if the vendor listed on the ticket gives it away… Surely the tickets and payments for them are audited ?
You get to choose your own numbers if you want. Just fill out the form with the numbers you know are going to win.
I believe the accusation is that he purchased a ticket normally, then rigged the computer to draw the numbers on his existing ticket.
What was the rationale for this? It seems like the physical ball drop/draw event is virtually all of the drama of the lottery, and would also make cheating of this sort all but impossible.
They allege that he went into the room with the pseudorandom number generator and messed with the video camera so it only recorded one second every minute. He then uploaded some software into the computer off a flash drive that allowed him to calculate/set a future lottery number. After the software runs it deletes itself off the computer.
He then goes to a convenience store and buys a ticket with that number while wearing a fake beard. He can’t cash it himself though, so he tries to get a guy to cash it for him and that’s where the whole scheme starts to unravel.
Serves them right for using a pseudorandom number generator. That’s just asking for trouble.
I think there was a case of cheating involving weighting the balls.
<googles> Here we are: 1980 Pennsylvania Lottery scandal - Wikipedia
Conspirators were caught because the pattern was detected by suspicious officials, but the tampering did work and did yield a winning ticket.
Has it ever succeeded? Who knows? If it succeeded, it would have been undetected and therefor outside of our knowledge.
Some lotteries still use the balls, for at least the main draws. In Canada, the Lotto 6/49 and Lotto MAX main draws are still done with balls, though other parts of those games are done using a random number generator.
Ontario Lotto has an FAQon the subject.