He started in 2005 and the investigation started in 2015, so he did get away with it for 10 years. He probably could have won a few, stopped, and gotten away with it if he'd been less greedy.

The code was clever, generating predictable numbers on a few particular days of the year. And it must have been subtle, to survive 10 years of nobody else noticing.

Makes you wonder how many people do get away with things like this without anybody realising.

Most criminals get away with most crimes. 40% of murders go unsolved.

Wouldn't that mean they don't get away with most murders?

It's close enough that undetected/unreported murders could tip the scales. If you get away with making it look like an accident, isn't in the statistic of unsolved murders.

sure, but most crimes aren't murders.

The investigation started in 2010, so five years. But still, five years is a lot.

I think a big flag would be lots of winning tickets with the numbers selected. I suspect some astonishingly high rate of tickets sold are selected by the lottery terminal ("quick pick").

He would have gotten away with it, if it weren't for those pesky kids.

Especially with a frankly embarrassingly poor attempt to place distance between himself and the payouts. He picked his own brother and a close family friend? Might as well have walked up to his boss every other week with a spot of feigned surprise and a new jackpot winning ticket to cash out, figuring they could direct deposit it along with his paycheck.

Really makes you wonder how many moderately intelligent people out there are successfully running schemes like this and just never arouse suspicion.

The family friend would have been fine.

The problem was not enough legwork. That person should have played those numbers for a few months or at least weeks before hand.

As a thought exercise, what do you think the minimum distance between the cheater and the payout would need to be in order to avoid detection?

High enough that you can't fully trust the guy getting the payout to share.

If someone you just vaguely know made you an offer to get this payout would you accept it or turn them in? Most of us reading this make enough money that we can afford to be honest in cases like this, so it is a moral question only - are you really dishonest enough to cheat?

Yeah I'd accept that, without much hesitation.

I don't know if distance matters. Let's say he found the perfect stranger who agrees to this. I think the bigger problem would be how do they exchange $7,000,000 in a way that nobody will notice?

Money-laundering is cheap and easy.

at minimum a bacon number of 2

AKA Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

> Might as well have walked up to his boss every other week with a spot of feigned surprise and a new jackpot winning ticket to cash out, figuring they could direct deposit it along with his paycheck.

Now this is a prestige TV series I would watch.

smart enough to pull it off but dumb enough to think that having your brother win a $14,000,000 prize is not suspicious and wouldn't be investigated... that's impressive.

Even the stupid lizard criminal portion of my brain tells me that you never set yourself up to win the jackpot. You take the third place prize.

But even then, you need a plausible reason to be cashing in so many winning tickets, so you also spend some of your guaranteed winnings on losing tickets, and also buy a bunch that will break even. That 3rd-place prize is less suspicious if you're also cashing in 1000 $2 winners at the same time, and putting it all into a "Lottery Buyer's Club LLC" account.

It's the Superman III principle. You can steal as many half-pennies as you can haul away in a truck, but if you take even one $10000 note, someone is going to notice.

It wasn't his brother. But it was a friend who lived in Texas that tried to claim the Iowa lottery winnings.

The Iowa Attorney General was so incompetent in the digital forensics they barely convicted him the first trial. Only after did they figure out how he did it.

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

The firm who investigated presented at DEFCON this year. Here's the PDF.

https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2025/DEF%20CON%2025%20pre...

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.

Related question: how many people have gotten away with things like this that we have no knowledge of?

This guy got away with it for 5 years. The only other one I know of is the McDonald's Monopoly guy who rigged it for 4 years. This tells me you can get away with it for a while, repeatedly. And I really doubt most people would take a huge payout, then keep working that job to do it again. So I suspect that it takes 4 or 5 years to get caught and we're just catching the minority of people greedy enough to keep their scam going for years, despite the massive amounts of money they've accumulated already.

Let's start the betting on the answers...

People overestimate over estimate possible improbable odds and underestimate near certain odds.

Much the same way the mental processes enjoy playing the lottery.

See Possibility Effect, Certainty Effect