1. I’m a straight and narrow physicist, who, by chance, made the acquaintance of, and hung out with convenience store owners and assorted low lives. (There was a point in my existence where I considered this aspect of lower middle class culture exotic or titillating.) I would like to disabuse all the star programmers and scientists who read Hacker News of any notion that the economic subgroup cited does not have extremely intelligent members in surplus, easily able to outwit state authorities in the crimes (and they are crimes— statistics here are reliable) cited. 2. A key point of the article is that the state’s revenue is not damaged by an unfair distribution of winnings. Indeed, were it to become well known that the lottery was unfair, the revenues do stand to be damaged. So there is zero incentive for the state to match any sort of sophistication on the part of cheaters with the necessary investigative prowess to catch them. 3. Most of the instances cited are clear examples of convenience store employees being able to detect the winning tickets in an undetectable way. This is indeed the case, and is well known in the industry. The article, I conjecture, greatly underestimates the sophistication of the detection methods. 4. I would guess that a majority of multiple winners NOT connected with scratch-off pre-detection are associated with various levels of money laundering. 5. There are times when it is more propitious to play these moron games. But I would defy you to find a situation where the odds are actually in your favor, i.e. where your expectation value of winnings is not negative.
One could argue that scratch-off games are inherently unfair, because the game provider already knows whether or not a ticket is a winner, and is hiding that information from the purchaser. The method of hiding could be imperfect. The odds calculations could have a flaw.
If you have any ambitions for cracking a lottery game, go for the small games in states with unsophisticated gaming regulators.
In any case, playing scratch-offs successfully requires research into the rules, which players hardly ever do. For instance, if the top prize for a scratch-off game has already been won, you should never play that game again. If it hasn't been won, you aggressively sell those tickets to other people, let them scratch, and then collect their non-winners for the second-chance drawing. You can't rely on the odds on the back of the ticket, you have to continually recheck the prizes won and recalculate the odds, and only play when expected value rises above ticket cost.
And that ignores completely the possibility that convenience store clerks are cherry-picking all the winners off the spool before you get the chance to play. It's just not worth it for anyone, unless they cheat in some way.
>One could argue that scratch-off games are inherently unfair
There's nothing inherent about scratch-off games that forces sellers to be in a privileged position about whether tickets they are selling are winners. If the buyer supplies a source of entropy that they commit to, the ticket has a it's own entropy.
The bit about second chance drawings... Are there rules about you having to be the person who bought the ticket? I see discarded losing (I'm assuming) tickets outside convenience stores all the time (maybe just in states without those drawings.) It seems like it would be relatively easy to get $5 worth of losing lottery tickets without spending $5. Especially while working at a convenience store.
The article suggests "micro-scratching" as a cheating technique. Wouldn't just completely scratching off and re-applying the scratch material be the easiest way to cheat?
Reapplying and matching the original tickets covering well enough is probably pretty hard to do and would probably require a larger investment into the materials and equipment.
Wasn't there just an article on here about a retired couple exploiting a game flaw with a purchasing pool? The lotto didn't care, it doesn't affect them. I think it's more likely people found a flaw in the game than cheating / fraud.
Anecdotal, but in my experience buying scratch offs in Wisconsin: The winning tickets seemed to be "front loaded" into a new game with diminishing odds as the game ages.
Are most of these multiple winnners anonymous? I see quite a few names mentioned in the article. Besides, the anonymous thing only matters to giant wins, like the recent case of nearly half a billion dollars. I’d guess the scrutiny there is orders of magnitude greater than a 5 digit winner.
In addition to the obvious scams and microscratching, I’d be surprised if this wasn’t an avenue for organized crime to launder money. The store(s) get the sales and a percentage, and the launderer gets clean money out of the other end.
I was one of those downvoters because your comment adds nothing but pretends to be very insightful. You aren't actually computing likelihoods and multiplying them together, you're just pretending to. Bayes' theorem says we really can know: you just need to see enough suspiciously successful winnings to be able to conclude that something was happening outside of the standard lottery process. Bringing in religion to this entirely unrelated field is pointless.
"We can't really know" is a ridiculous thing to say about lottery cheating, when often a small investigation will show that yes, someone is definitely cheating. It's practically anti-scientific to phrase it as a shrug of the impossibility of knowing.
It might be safer to say that it's hard to know how much undiscovered cheating there if there is no discovered cheating.
The religion example is even less helpful, as religion isn't evidence-based.
Only in the absolute sense. You cannot provide canonically that an unobserved event happened or didn't happen.
That's why we have an investigative process. The investigator or auditor looks at patterns and notices that a guy wins the lottery multiple times. Then you dig and notice that the guy buys or claims tickets at a single or small collection of retailers. Then you dig and find out that there are personal relationships between the "winner" and the people in the store.
At that point, there are options:
- The lottery can amend it's regulations and review how the games work and make appropriate changes.
- The lottery can investigate the retailer and take action against the retailer's license to sell tickets. Typically the lottery has broad discretion to take action there with a legal standard that has a low bar.
- The lottery can pursue a civil action against the retailer or "winner". Civil actions require a jury to meet a preponderance of evidence standard.
- The police or IG can pursue a criminal case, with a high standard.
Because we don't know with certainty how hard it is to cheat at the lottery. Of course if it comes out that some people are cheating we'd know that that's at least one way to cheat.
So you have a large unknown variable there in your assumption.
How does the religion example apply? I don't understand that so much.
[+] [-] aj7|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] logfromblammo|8 years ago|reply
If you have any ambitions for cracking a lottery game, go for the small games in states with unsophisticated gaming regulators.
In any case, playing scratch-offs successfully requires research into the rules, which players hardly ever do. For instance, if the top prize for a scratch-off game has already been won, you should never play that game again. If it hasn't been won, you aggressively sell those tickets to other people, let them scratch, and then collect their non-winners for the second-chance drawing. You can't rely on the odds on the back of the ticket, you have to continually recheck the prizes won and recalculate the odds, and only play when expected value rises above ticket cost.
And that ignores completely the possibility that convenience store clerks are cherry-picking all the winners off the spool before you get the chance to play. It's just not worth it for anyone, unless they cheat in some way.
[+] [-] DINKDINK|8 years ago|reply
There's nothing inherent about scratch-off games that forces sellers to be in a privileged position about whether tickets they are selling are winners. If the buyer supplies a source of entropy that they commit to, the ticket has a it's own entropy.
[+] [-] tnorthcutt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrs235|8 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16494280
[+] [-] dwighttk|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ayemiller|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtkwe|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dalore|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deft|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulie_a|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frotak|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alfonzo5819|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|8 years ago|reply
This is a pretty obvious path for money laundering and other forms of corruption and fraud.
[+] [-] rhino369|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Erlangolem|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Erlangolem|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrLeap|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] r00fus|8 years ago|reply
Why do you think James Bond was always around a casino? Winnings can cleanly pay for hitjobs.
[+] [-] DanBC|8 years ago|reply
But in that case the money launderer doesn't even need to win, they just need a receipt showing they gambled.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/08/gambling-mac...
This is a long lasting problem that's led to fines for the industry: https://www.ft.com/content/b90289cc-1616-11e8-9376-4a6390add...
[+] [-] lstyls|8 years ago|reply
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1991/08/07/h....
[+] [-] EGreg|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tgb|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|8 years ago|reply
It might be safer to say that it's hard to know how much undiscovered cheating there if there is no discovered cheating.
The religion example is even less helpful, as religion isn't evidence-based.
[+] [-] Spooky23|8 years ago|reply
That's why we have an investigative process. The investigator or auditor looks at patterns and notices that a guy wins the lottery multiple times. Then you dig and notice that the guy buys or claims tickets at a single or small collection of retailers. Then you dig and find out that there are personal relationships between the "winner" and the people in the store.
At that point, there are options:
- The lottery can amend it's regulations and review how the games work and make appropriate changes.
- The lottery can investigate the retailer and take action against the retailer's license to sell tickets. Typically the lottery has broad discretion to take action there with a legal standard that has a low bar.
- The lottery can pursue a civil action against the retailer or "winner". Civil actions require a jury to meet a preponderance of evidence standard.
- The police or IG can pursue a criminal case, with a high standard.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] odonnellryan|8 years ago|reply
Because we don't know with certainty how hard it is to cheat at the lottery. Of course if it comes out that some people are cheating we'd know that that's at least one way to cheat.
So you have a large unknown variable there in your assumption.
How does the religion example apply? I don't understand that so much.