That couple in New England that was doing it probably made more money off of selling their story to Hollywood than they did off the lottery tickets.
The amount of time they were putting into their “scheme” sounds brutal. I think a lot of people here could have netted more money per hour by studying up to pass a FAANG interview instead of buying lottery tickets one at a time.
> people here could have netted more money per hour by studying up to pass a FAANG interview
My experience of that was that Google asked me to interview, I did, my recruiter congratulated me on passing the interviews and told me to expect a job offer by the end of the hiring cycle, and then at the end of the hiring cycle she informed me that, although I'd passed the interview, my interview performance was too poor to be considered for hiring.
>I think a lot of people here could have netted more money per hour by studying up to pass a FAANG interview instead of buying lottery tickets one at a time.
Bro, saying stuff like this is why everyone hates us.
Most lotteries, all of them that I'm familiar with, blackout ticket sales for several minutes around the draw to avoid order sensitivity issues like this. It's funny, lotto vending machines here don't say when the drawings are for each game, but you can tell by reading the fine print for the five minute window where tickets are not sold.
>2. get access to a router firmware in the lottery datacenter en route to the database
Seems non-trivial given that the database server is likely to be in the same datacenter/rack/physical machine. If you have this much access you might as well plant a backdoor in the server and tamper with the database however you want.
>3. wait for the query to get the winning numbers from the database
Are lottery winners determined immediately after they close? I thought they did a number picking ceremony by picking out literal number balls from a tumbler?
Tldr- about 20 years ago, when off-track betting systems were less sophisticated, an insider past-posted horse racing jackpot winners by waiting until the first 4 races of the Pick-6 were final before creating the ticket. They got busted and served time in federal prison because they had multiple winning tickets for the Breeders Cup Pick-6, basically the Super Bowl of horse racing, where scrutiny was extremely high.
the term they meant is texas lottery "riskless arbitrage".
Buying a whole pizza, then standing in front of the pizza shop shelling the slices for a net profit is arbitrage. but it's risky because you might not be able to sell enough of them (before they get cold, say) to earn back your investment.
when you talk about an arbitrage that is guaranteed profit, that is a riskless arbitrage.
Really? Doesn’t that describe every kind of store where you don’t create the product yourself as an arbitrage? You’re just buying items from a supplier and reselling to make a profit
I guess I’ll never understand why there are so many restrictions in buying lottery tickets, because in Hong Kong all you need do to buy all the numbers is a single transaction and paying enough money. And it is never a profitable strategy, big jackpots always attract a huge crowd and most of the time it is split at least 4 way
It's article is filed under Bloomberg opinion, but I failed to find a common thread or observation has I read to the end. Is this just a weekly Roundup of financial events?
About the 23andMe and pharma events were specially interesting.
That said, I disagree with Matt interpretation that the computer entry overrode the contract. Arbitrator stipulated compensation based on the contract date, not the computer executed date
When someone has 35 million of options, i would expect both parties have some duty to understand the terms. That said, they also have a duty to not misrepresent the contract after the fact.
[edit] My primary point is that I didnt see much opinion or rant
>Is this just a weekly Roundup of financial events?
Matt publishes his newsletter Monday-Thursday, and a podcast on Fridays. It is a roundup of stories with high quality commentary on 2-4 stories, and a list of additional interesting articles at the bottom. He used to be an attorney with Goldman Sachs, giving him a good background for adding context to market corner cases people exploit, incentives of different parties involved in deals, legal perspective, etc.
Two of his main lines is "everything is securities fraud" and "everything might be insider trading", with probably 100+ examples of each over the years.
It's one person's column, having it filed under opinion probably gives him a bit more freedom to say what he wants even if he doesn't always exercise it. (It's always amusing when Michael Lewis is in the news to watch Levine finds ways to make it clear he thinks he's an idiot without ever directly badmouthing his colleague).
HN moderation policy is to replace useful or informative user-submitted titles with the title of the page itself in most cases.
I used to work for the Australian parimutuel(aka tote or pool)[0] betting operator.
All the proceeds for a race are placed in a pool, the operator deducts a percentage of pool as a takeout, and the rest is divided among the winners, or. is carried over into a jackpot.
We had special bulk betting integrations for quantitative bettors, and even offered rebates on the takeout revenue, it's not secret, although it's not widely publicised.[1]
There are stories of traders that have made lots of money betting in parimutuel markets[1]
One of the standouts being the syndicate run by David Walsh (of MONA fame) and Zeljko Ranogajec. They made money because the rebates swung the odds in their favour [1].
My take is that: the syndicate wins because the odds were swung in their favour. The tote wins because even with the discounted percentage the increased pool size offset the rebate and made them more money. The rest of the mug punters lost since the syndicate was winning a portion of the pool they would have otherwise won. The rebates are a mechanism to reliably transfer additional money from mug punters to the tote via an enabling middleman (the syndicate).
As a side note, my home state also allows online purchasing of lotto tickets through "couriers", which turns out to be a strange workaround that let companies like Lotto.com or Jackpocket operate in some states:
The key here is that only 1 million tickets per week are sold, which is the reason the company could estimate a probability that others buy the winning ticket forcing a split
Jackpots higher than the probability of winning happen so the time, but thats not enough information to take the risk
I wonder if anyone is keeping a list of all the times this has happened?
I know that its not something new, because 30 years ago when I was in law school one of the cases studied in my class on transnational taxation was that of an Australian group (if I'm remembering the right country...) that tried to buy every possible ticket in a US lottery.
My recollection is that they only ended up getting something like 90% of the possible numbers but that was enough to get the top prizes and questions arose on how that should be taxed and whether the cost of the tickets was deductible.
Ah, so if doing this once can net tens of millions, all we have to do is repeat the process a few million times, and the national debt is covered. That's where automation comes in.
> In April 2023, an entity called Rook TX effectively purchased the jackpot, collecting a one-time payment of $57.8 million, by acquiring virtually all of the 25.8 million possible number combinations. The operation was planned in Malta and funded by a London betting company. It was carried out by four Texas retailers, all connected to online sales companies called couriers.
Well, as the saying goes, "It takes money to make money."
Lottery couriers are companies that will buy and scan lottery tickets for you for a fee. Most of the time, they're not actually doing much courier work. If you win a small amount, they'll cash the ticket for you and credit it to your account, and if you win a big enough amount that you have to cash it in directly with the state, they'll actually deliver you the winning ticket.
It's basically a workaround for restrictions on online lottery sales. I'm not sure how states should handle online lottery gambling—there are a lot of considerations around addiction, potential fraud, money laundering, and erosion of retailer lottery revenue and shopper base—but I don't think this is it.
A lot of people are focusing on the courier aspect of all this which is fine, but I didn't know there were any lotteries you could just outright win, with a profit, if you had enough money to buy enough tickets. I assumed people would design lotteries where the cost/reward ratio was such that this would never make sense.
> “We fully expected that they would laugh at us and say, ‘Well, no, of course you can’t do this,’” he said. But the company agreed it would at least sound out the lottery agency.
> “We were very surprised that the answer was yes,” Potts added. “As a person and a lottery player, I cannot believe they said yes. I was shocked.”
Well Texas bills itself as the most business friendly state in the country. I'm not surprised that extends to some shadowy Maltese concern effectively purchasing the lottery jackpot at 25 cents on the dollar.
Spinola Gaming are hardly shadowy. Since a few years back they're owned by HeadsUp Entertainment, HDUP on whatever stock market.
It's not surprising that a corporation specialised in producing B2B products for lottery and gambling corporations sussed out this opportunity, it's kind of their core competency to figure out such things and make them obvious to their customers in their offerings.
I don't get why you shouldn't be allowed to do this and it's not the first time it has happened either[1]. "Investors" in this kind of thing are still taking a small risk that they might have to share the winnings with another winning ticket.
[+] [-] ioblomov|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hinkley|1 year ago|reply
The amount of time they were putting into their “scheme” sounds brutal. I think a lot of people here could have netted more money per hour by studying up to pass a FAANG interview instead of buying lottery tickets one at a time.
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|1 year ago|reply
My experience of that was that Google asked me to interview, I did, my recruiter congratulated me on passing the interviews and told me to expect a job offer by the end of the hiring cycle, and then at the end of the hiring cycle she informed me that, although I'd passed the interview, my interview performance was too poor to be considered for hiring.
[+] [-] danielmarkbruce|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanmcbride|1 year ago|reply
Bro, saying stuff like this is why everyone hates us.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] WorkerBee28474|1 year ago|reply
Her Wikipedia article is sadly short [0], but there are a number of other sadly short and poorly sourced articles around the web to augment it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_R._Ginther
[+] [-] ceejayoz|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] imajoredinecon|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] stavros|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] withinboredom|1 year ago|reply
1. get access to a lottery ticket terminal
2. get access to a router firmware in the lottery datacenter en route to the database
3. wait for the query to get the winning numbers from the database
4. hold that packet and submit an INSERT into the database with you as the winning number at a predetermined date/time in the past
5. release the packet to query the database
6. hack the terminal to print your winning ticket with the predetermined date/time in the past
7. profit?
It probably doesn't work, but it was fun thinking about when I was younger.
[+] [-] jcrawfordor|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] gruez|1 year ago|reply
Seems non-trivial given that the database server is likely to be in the same datacenter/rack/physical machine. If you have this much access you might as well plant a backdoor in the server and tamper with the database however you want.
>3. wait for the query to get the winning numbers from the database
Are lottery winners determined immediately after they close? I thought they did a number picking ceremony by picking out literal number balls from a tumbler?
[+] [-] bentcorner|1 year ago|reply
If you have this capability then why not just insert all number combinations into the db well before draw time?
Makes me wonder how money flows from lottery terminals back to the lottery itself. I imagine there's some rigorous bookkeeping involved.
[+] [-] immibis|1 year ago|reply
I don't know whether it still applies after the transition to proof-of-stake.
[+] [-] andy800|1 year ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Breeders%27_Cup_betting...
[+] [-] viraptor|1 year ago|reply
If the terminal is not a dumb gateway to the central service, that would be a massive risk. I'd be extremely surprised if that was possible.
I mean, you could probably still print something, but any validity check would fail.
[+] [-] fsckboy|1 year ago|reply
Buying a whole pizza, then standing in front of the pizza shop shelling the slices for a net profit is arbitrage. but it's risky because you might not be able to sell enough of them (before they get cold, say) to earn back your investment.
when you talk about an arbitrage that is guaranteed profit, that is a riskless arbitrage.
[+] [-] rightbyte|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] baobabKoodaa|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sincerely|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] danielmarkbruce|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] charlieyu1|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Panzer04|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] s1artibartfast|1 year ago|reply
About the 23andMe and pharma events were specially interesting.
That said, I disagree with Matt interpretation that the computer entry overrode the contract. Arbitrator stipulated compensation based on the contract date, not the computer executed date
When someone has 35 million of options, i would expect both parties have some duty to understand the terms. That said, they also have a duty to not misrepresent the contract after the fact.
[edit] My primary point is that I didnt see much opinion or rant
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] DavidPeiffer|1 year ago|reply
Matt publishes his newsletter Monday-Thursday, and a podcast on Fridays. It is a roundup of stories with high quality commentary on 2-4 stories, and a list of additional interesting articles at the bottom. He used to be an attorney with Goldman Sachs, giving him a good background for adding context to market corner cases people exploit, incentives of different parties involved in deals, legal perspective, etc.
Two of his main lines is "everything is securities fraud" and "everything might be insider trading", with probably 100+ examples of each over the years.
[+] [-] lmm|1 year ago|reply
HN moderation policy is to replace useful or informative user-submitted titles with the title of the page itself in most cases.
[+] [-] Arcuru|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] WatchDog|1 year ago|reply
All the proceeds for a race are placed in a pool, the operator deducts a percentage of pool as a takeout, and the rest is divided among the winners, or. is carried over into a jackpot.
We had special bulk betting integrations for quantitative bettors, and even offered rebates on the takeout revenue, it's not secret, although it's not widely publicised.[1]
There are stories of traders that have made lots of money betting in parimutuel markets[1]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parimutuel_betting [1]: https://www.sportstradingnetwork.com/article/rebates-global-... [2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/the-gambl...
[+] [-] femto|1 year ago|reply
My take is that: the syndicate wins because the odds were swung in their favour. The tote wins because even with the discounted percentage the increased pool size offset the rebate and made them more money. The rest of the mug punters lost since the syndicate was winning a portion of the pool they would have otherwise won. The rebates are a mechanism to reliably transfer additional money from mug punters to the tote via an enabling middleman (the syndicate).
[1] https://www.perthturftalk.com.au/discussion/discussion/11724...
[+] [-] spelunker|1 year ago|reply
https://www.locance.com/blog/what-are-lottery-courier-servic...
[+] [-] waynenilsen|1 year ago|reply
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2011/07/30/lottery-game-wi...
[+] [-] paulsutter|1 year ago|reply
Jackpots higher than the probability of winning happen so the time, but thats not enough information to take the risk
[+] [-] _trampeltier|1 year ago|reply
https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/loterie-romande-serial-players-...
[+] [-] tzs|1 year ago|reply
I know that its not something new, because 30 years ago when I was in law school one of the cases studied in my class on transnational taxation was that of an Australian group (if I'm remembering the right country...) that tried to buy every possible ticket in a US lottery.
My recollection is that they only ended up getting something like 90% of the possible numbers but that was enough to get the top prizes and questions arose on how that should be taxed and whether the cost of the tickets was deductible.
[+] [-] waldrews|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] adiabatichottub|1 year ago|reply
Well, as the saying goes, "It takes money to make money."
[+] [-] smelendez|1 year ago|reply
It's basically a workaround for restrictions on online lottery sales. I'm not sure how states should handle online lottery gambling—there are a lot of considerations around addiction, potential fraud, money laundering, and erosion of retailer lottery revenue and shopper base—but I don't think this is it.
[+] [-] tarentel|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] gblargg|1 year ago|reply
That must have been tense knowing they didn't purchase that last fraction of a percent.
[+] [-] criddell|1 year ago|reply
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/02/27/texas-senate-lottery...
[+] [-] bena|1 year ago|reply
What am I missing here?
[+] [-] brendanfinan|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] impish9208|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kubectl_h|1 year ago|reply
> “We were very surprised that the answer was yes,” Potts added. “As a person and a lottery player, I cannot believe they said yes. I was shocked.”
Well Texas bills itself as the most business friendly state in the country. I'm not surprised that extends to some shadowy Maltese concern effectively purchasing the lottery jackpot at 25 cents on the dollar.
[+] [-] cess11|1 year ago|reply
It's not surprising that a corporation specialised in producing B2B products for lottery and gambling corporations sussed out this opportunity, it's kind of their core competency to figure out such things and make them obvious to their customers in their offerings.
[+] [-] AlexandrB|1 year ago|reply
[1] http://investpost.org/mutual-funds/group-invests-5-million-t...
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]