Ex-Lottery Worker Convicted of Programming System To Win $14M 217
An anonymous reader sends news that Eddie Tipton, a man who worked for the Multi-State Lottery Association, has been convicted of rigging a computerized lottery game so he could win the $14 million jackpot. Tipton wrote a computer program that would ensure certain numbers were picked in the lottery game, and ran it on lottery system machines. He then deleted it and bought a ticket from a convenience store. Lottery employees are forbidden to play, so he tried to get acquaintances to cash the winning ticket for him. Unfortunately for him, Iowa law requires the original ticket buyer's name to be divulged before any money can be paid out.
Correction: (Score:4, Funny)
Unfortunately for him, he had stupid friends - FTFY.
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No, he was an idiot for buying the ticket himself.
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No, anyone is an idiot who puts money on electronic devices that are so easy to game. If not for the fact that he screwed up and bought the ticket under his name, he would be richer and everyone who played would be screwed out of their money.
Makes you wonder how many of these succeed without being found out.
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So the stock market then?
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Or any banking or other financial system.
Your money isn't stored in a big container with your name on it. It's bits in the banks systems. Relatively speaking, it's trivial to move the bits from your account to someone else's account. Practically speaking, there are safeguards in place to ensure this doesn't happen in an unauthorized manner and to track all transactions that happen, but at the core this is a computer system and someone could theoretically hack the system to increase their funds and decrease yours.
Keeping your money off of all electronic systems would mean stuffing piles of bills into your mattress.
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give it to me in gold then.
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And even if you went the "piles of bills into your mattress" route, that's just pieces of paper.
And even if you went the "gold bars" route, that's just atoms of some incidentally rare material on earth. We could find a bunch of gold on some other planet, or simply just not deem it valuable anymore at some point in the future.
It's all just a big game of monopoly.
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It's not so easy (Score:5, Insightful)
> he was an idiot for buying the ticket himself.
I agree, but at the same time, have a think about how many people you know to whom you can say: "I found a way to defraud a company of 14 million and you can have half but I need you to put your name to it."
Rule out all your acquaintances who aren't smart enough to avoid fucking it up, plus those who you can't trust, and rule out friends with kids or a job who are afraid of jail time, and people who can't keep a secret from their own friends and family who might fuck it up. And remember, for each person who says "no" to your plan, you've just created someone who can testify against you or blackmail you.
And then your accomplice has to get your half to you. A bank transfer of seven million is a little incriminating, or if they give you a suitcase of cash, you can't just lodge it into your account. "Enjoying" your money isn't so easy when you have to avoid ever creating a record of having the money.
Finding an accomplice for a big illegal act isn't *that* easy.
Re:It's not so easy (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly what I was thinking.
You need someone criminal enough to go along with it, loyal enough to never divulge the secret, competent enough to not screw it up and savvy enough to not trip on any of the hundred pitfalls along the way... that's sort of a tall order.
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Easy enough for a Trust fund to retrieve the payout, deposited into an account in the Cayman's.
Then all your stooge has to do is, when asked, agree that he was the original purchaser of the ticket. The trust fund manager is the one who will receive the money and manage any payouts from the trust. He's the one you have to rely on not to screw things up, so you should go with a good, experienced trust manager, most of whom would find $14M (payout probably only $6-8M) as small potatoes.
If you're really paran
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"competent enough to not screw it up" ... yet not so competent as to say "why don't you gimme $1M and I'll pretend I never heard you say this!"
That's the opposite of competent.
1) Instead of getting access to $7 million (or $14 million if you want to try and screw the guy), you're going for $1 million.
2) Made it harder for the guy to get his money in the first place in order to get paid that $1 million.
3) You've offered the guy a motive to kill you to silence you for trying to blackmail him. You made an enemy out of somebody you had a relation of trust with.
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And then your accomplice has to get your half to you. A bank transfer of seven million is a little incriminating, or if they give you a suitcase of cash, you can't just lodge it into your account. "Enjoying" your money isn't so easy when you have to avoid ever creating a record of having the money.
Well, as long as you can avoid the government spying program, I mean Anti-terrorist program that requires banks to notify the government of any large deposit, I would think you would be okay. It is not like the inter state lottery is going to keep track of where their winners spend their money, or even has the jurisdiction to do so. The only reason they could is if there was previous suspicion and they could get a judge to issue a warrant.
Even if you tripped the government's bells over a large deposit, I d
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Yes it is, just contact the mafia and expect to settle for a 10% cut.
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...plus those who you can't trust
You do raise some really good points (although I'm pretty sure I can think of at least a few friends who could go along w/ it), but the trust issue could be greatly mitigated by a video recording of the illicit agreement. If your friend tries to make off with all of it, you have evidence of their complicity.
It is rather baffling that this person didn't execute his plan any better. He should have had his friend buying lottery tickets every day for months beforehand.
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I know a few people with the technical know-how to pull this kind of thing off, and then completely fuck it up when it came to common sense stuff.
I'm thinking of one person in particular who wanted to steal a companies data and try to sell it to another company for a few thousand dollars. He seemed pretty sure that the "I didn't steal the data, I generated the same data independently" defense would be unimpeachable. He seemed to confuse the notion of "proving something with certainty" with "proving someth
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And make the winning numbers something meaningful to him so he has a good, natural story for why he picked them. Daughter's birthday or something.
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It's much easier...
You to trusted friend: "Hey want to buy a lottery ticket? I'll go in half but can't pick it up today if you don't mind paying for it." Use these numbers, it's my lucky numbers.
Done. I have friends that I'm 98% sure they would give me half and not let me worry about being in the public spot light.
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In this particular case the requirements seem to be very low, any doofus can win the lottery and it doesn't require any elaborate explanations. You bought a lottery ticket, you won, lucky you. The lottery makes the payout and case closed, if that's all done why wouldn't you just make a bank transfer? As long as you do everything openly with the IRS and pay your taxes I don't see why they'd even look twice. The bank isn't likely to tell anyone because of client confidentiality, the winner just says he gave h
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And then your accomplice has to get your half to you. A bank transfer of seven million is a little incriminating, or if they give you a suitcase of cash, you can't just lodge it into your account. "Enjoying" your money isn't so easy when you have to avoid ever creating a record of having the money.
Well there is more on this thing when you are including "taxes." The taxes would eventually help to find its way back to the employee's plan. By the way, for 14 millions and if he chooses to do 50:50, the whole taxes witholding may be on him and that would net him 3.5 millions instead of 7 millions.
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I recommend being a "benevolent" lottery cheater. You can find out what numbers your friends and family members have picked (or always pick), and just rig the game for those numbers to come up.
They won't know of any cheating, so they won't act nervous or weird.
If enough of your friends and family win the lottery, maybe they will give you some.
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Just to summarise your plan: When the investigator asks you why winner Dave wants the 14 million to go into your account, you answer "I don't know".
That's the extent of your plan?!
You don't cash $14 million tickets in a corner shop, you know that, right?
AC, you've just been removed from my list of possible accomplices.
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ROFL. Unless Iowa requires the purchaser of a lotto ticket to show id at the time of purchase, whoever signs the ticket is the "purchaser." He foiled the lottery, if he didn't want to get caught, he shouldn't have laid ANY claim to it, and sold the "winning lottery ticket" on the street for $500. Sure, it's a lot less than the 15,000,000 that was the prize, and sure, it even sounds like a lousy scam, but his chances of getting caught would be significantly lessened.
Would you go through all the troubles just for $500 or a couple thousand dollars when you may have (or plan to have) a chance of millions? I highly doubt you (or anyone) would do what you said. I think your reply makes no sense at all and rather is silly.
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You can agree to stay captive in their underground lair until they get their winnings.
I think you've watched too much Breaking Bad.
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He did all that (Score:2)
_________
Only if villains could shoot straight
No Plan? (Score:2)
Lessons learned from McDonald's Monopoly fraud (Score:4, Informative)
>> he tried to get acquaintances to cash the winning ticket for him
He should have looked into how insiders scammed McDonald's Monopoly contests for about $13M first.
http://lubbockonline.com/stori... [lubbockonline.com]
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Well, unless they just pushed it too far and got greedy.
And this is why... (Score:2)
...everyone should learn to program. :)
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I think I have a good idea for the challenge in the next Underhanded C Contest...
First Clue... (Score:2)
Re:First Clue... (Score:4, Funny)
First clue something was wrong was the winning number was 1-2-3-4-5-6.
Due, this was in C/C++... It was 0-1-2-3-4-5.....
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Wrong, your luggage only requires five numbers mr. president.
Fake SSN? (Score:2)
It's times like these when a truly clever criminal would make use of a social security number and fake identity set up years before.
Need to find a co-conspirator BEFORE you do this (Score:2)
Everything else is relatively unimportant. Anyone can code a script to steal the lottery. Well, any of us here could do it.
There are certain parts of a crime that they don't show on TV, so stupid criminals don't do them. This is half the reason why they get caught.
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So when this trusted friend claims the $14m and then decides to keep it all, what do you do then? Hey, he's not sharing the money from the scheme I rigged?
It sounds like the perfect crime...from the trusted friend's perspective.
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Have dirt on them? Threaten murder?
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Yea, I have to say, anyone willing to steal 14 million dollars and involve me in the process... expects to get their cut of 7 million...
I wouldn't put it past them to not think about killing me...
I'd rather have 7 million and know that the person who knows WHY I have 7 million also has 7 million and is happy, than to have 14 million and look over my shoulder for the rest of my life.
When you're committing a crime, don't screw your partner who can expose you.
Crime 101 I suppose...
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When you're committing a crime, don't screw your partner who can expose you.
Crime 101 I suppose...
I refer you to the opening heist of The Dark Knight, where each of the gang members shoots the gang member who has just done his bit.
"So do you kill me?"
"No, I kill the bus driver."
"Bus driver?"
(Bus crashes through wall, killing the first gang member. Second gang member shoots the bus driver)
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You're going to threaten murder on the guy with $14 million and who already has demonstrated his loyalty?
Seems to me he's the who could organize a professional hit...
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So when this trusted friend claims the $14m and then decides to keep it all, what do you do then?
Find somebody else you trust and do it again.... Eventually you will find a honorable criminal to share the wealth with... Better yet, blackmail the winners by threatening to turn yourself in if they don't keep you flush with spending money.
He was going to get caught anyway, it was just a matter of time. ANYBODY who won the lottery who started transferring large sums of money to someone who currently or even used to work for the lottery is asking for a real close look by authorities.
we only hear about the failed attempts (Score:2)
Naturally we only know about the times that this type of scheme fails.
If the lottery worker had got a 3rd party to buy the ticket in exchange for a large share
to the winnings (e.g. 50%) would he have got away with it?
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having worked in the gaming industry, you don't want to even have an air of suspicion around improper tampering of a gaming system, in this case a lottery system. Even if you're innocent you can lose your ability to make a living because you won't be able to be licensed or carried under a licensed gaming manufacturer.
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Got $14M, don't care.
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No, you have $14m in credited assets that the government can seize when there's any indication of fraud. You may have it for a short time, but before you realize it somebody goes WTF and you're in jail.
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Would a lottery worker suddenly in possession of $7m he didn't earn that was transferred from some guy he knew who won the lottery ever be under suspicion?
Gee, I don't know.
How would anybody know he had this money? He would probably quit his job and stop hanging out with his work friends. Cutting ties with them probably insures his safety right there. If he did ever run into anybody, he could tell them he won a bunch of money in Vegas.
Better yet, he could take the easy road and lead a successful upper middle class life without having to work and just not get too extravagant, and almost certainly nobody would suspect a thing.
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How many criminals are smart enough to think long term like this? Not many I'm afraid...
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How many criminals are smart enough to think long term like this? Not many I'm afraid...
But the thing is we mainly learn about the stupid criminals.
Those (however many there are) who are smart enough to make it work we don't
know about.
e.g. if someone uses an accomplice, doesn't spend any of the money for some time
(say a couple of years), then leaves work for a plausible reason and moves
to a new area, I'd guess we may not hear of these.
And we get a distorted view of criminals because the ones that succeed are never
heard about.
I think this counts as a "known unknown"....
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Noone knows, we only have records of the criminals who were stupid/unlucky enough to get caught. This is especially true for crimes where it is not obvious to the victim that a crime has been committed at all.
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This guy was caught because he was an idiot.
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Well, that and he broke the law.... Which kind of makes you an idiot in my book....
What you do is collect your money in to the LLC, offshore the cash ASAP and move to a place that won't extradite you back to the USA.
And yet (Score:2)
The infrastructure to launder this type of asset is well established and readily accessed
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What? Bit Coin?
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I was thinking of the neighborhood mob affiliate, but on further reflection any of the major banks would probably help as well if their cut were big enough.
Too geek-smart, too world-stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Once it became obvious he couldn't cash in the ticket without giving his real name, Tipton should have let it go uncollected. Once he figured out a way around the problem, he could have run his program again and cashed in.
Moron... (Score:3)
His obvious mistake was going for the jackpot. If he rigged it for smaller payouts under $500 over a long period of time, he might have escaped detection. Big numbers attract attention, smaller numbers seldom do.
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Perhaps, but the idea behind his sceme was the programs did what it did one time and deleted itself, so there would be very little to find later on. Very risky to have the program running of any lenght of time.
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Peter Gibbons: Well those are whole pennies, right? I'm just talking about fractions of a penny here. But we do it from a much bigger tray and we do it a couple a million times.
Like Superman III.
New tech fails again (Score:2)
This is why the lotto should stick to the time-proven technology of a giant cage of numbered balls rolling down a chute.
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This is why the lotto should stick to the time-proven technology of a giant cage of numbered balls rolling down a chute.
Like that's never been rigged....
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It may well be possible to rig the spinning cage full of balls. But I bet its a LOT harder to do (and a LOT riskier in terms of getting caught or getting it wrong and not getting the numbers you thought you were going to get).
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I'm not so sure it's all that hard to do myself. I can imagine a number of ways which may allow you to take out a bit of randomness by adjusting the size and weight of things and stack the odds in a way you could profit from. How you could do such a thing without getting caught though is an issue, but I'm sure somebody is clever enough to work out that detail if they could engineer the necessary changes to the physical system.
Think of it as the same kind of gaming the system as card counting is in blackja
Why do you let a computer choose the numbers? (Score:3)
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A well programmed random number generator is going to be better than kind of "random drawing". The problem was the lack of oversight in having the code be submitted. Any code changes that would hurt the reputation of an organization this badly should require multiple sign offs by code reviewers.
Now, it is possible that this got past the code reviewers, in which case I either congratulate the fraudster for some real underhanded coding, or I accuse the code reviewers for being inept.
It is also possible that t
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Why did he tell them he changed the program? (Score:2)
Also, didn't this all happen like a year ago? I seem to remember hearing about it a long time ago. Is slashdot just hearing about it now?
Evidence of CA lottery rigging? (Score:2)
I buy a donut and a $1-2 lottery ticket a couple times a week in CA at the same bakery.
Over several years it is obvious that the "Mega" number on each pick in that particular store is not random!
Approx 80% of all Mega numbers are in the range of 1-13. Someone has rigged the California Lottery, judging by what I see. Let the CA operator refute it.
Free tickets (Score:2)
I wonder if everyone that played that week could get a free ticket since it wasn't a fair draw. Probably a class action suit in there somewhere.
Better idea (Score:2)
He should have found someone, ideally a close family member who would have shared the prize, who had been playing the same numbers every week for years and had those number drawn. No need to go out and buy a ticket specifically for that draw himself and the pattern of the other person would have looked good too.
Wait what, a COMPUTER picks winning numbers? (Score:2)
what kind of retarded shit is that? I'm surprised it took this long before someone tampered with the computer to win.
California state lottery used to show their winning lotto numbers on live TV with a bunch of ping pong balls in a clear plastic chamber. High velocity air was pumped into it so that the balls bounced around like crazy. Then they would open a slot (also made of clear plastic) and 6 balls would fall in and those were your winning numbers. It was a very transparent setup (literally) and it was o
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Hi user:sexconker (1179573), we know it's you, you forgot to check the "Post Anonymously" box earlier:
http://news.slashdot.org/comme... [slashdot.org]
Re:When California wanted a lottery... (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
In short, despite what they tell you, the money is fungible. Not because they actually take the money from the lottery and use it for something else, but because it doesn't stop them from cutting OTHER funding for the schools. So say they previously spent $500 million on the schools each year. The lottery brings in $150 million, so that should mean the schools get $650m, right? Nope, because they just cut the school budget by $300 million, meaning the schools are now only getting $350 million, of which $150 million is from the lottery.
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Re:When California wanted a lottery... (Score:5, Insightful)
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They said it would benefit schools. Here we are 30 years later and our schools still struggle asking for donations of supplies.
Public schools are money pits. They will take as much money as you have and a few dollars more and provide just about the same level of education as they would on half the resources. They struggle because they have HUGE administrative costs and they are not effective at providing education because there is no incentive to perform.
I homeschooled my two children for about $800/year in supplies and about 4 hours a day of labor. We had a student to Teacher ratio of 2 to 1, spent only a fraction of what it c
Re:When California wanted a lottery... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Depending on what kind of full time job you had to give up, it could have cost upwards of $50,000 or $100,000 per year for you to educate your 2 kids, given the opportunity cost. Don't get me wrong, I can think of lots of *good* reasons to home school your kids, but saving money isn't one of them.
And it wasn't my reason either.. I was simply saying that my little two student homeschool cost less per student than what gets spent per student at the big public school up the street and that the public school system is a money pit that really doesn't fulfill it's primary purpose anymore..
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Detroit is a total mess you know and their public school system is a reflection of the same mess, loss of tax base, loss of students, loss of stability. I don't think I'd point to the Detroit schools as an example of how much it really costs us to provide public education, but no matter..
It's still a money pit. I have 2 students and one teacher and even with the opportunity costs of having my wife not work the $26,000 it cost my suburban public school price is way too high. I could have done it, and pai
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That's silly. You just didn't include any of the extra costs: a building for the class, a qualified teacher, heating, air conditioning, etc. Properly accounted, you probably spent many times what a public school spends per student.
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Yet, I have a student to staff ratio of 2 to 1, my little private school should NOT be as efficient as the big public school up the street with 10-15 to 1 student to staff ratio, yet, it is. Another poster put the suburban cost outside of Detroit at $13K per student, using his numbers I could have easily paid my wife for her part time effort and had money left over to pay for the building costs and such. Public schools should be able to make up a LOT of cost efficiency on volume because they have at least 5
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I was saying that my kids where being schooled by my wife about 4 hours per day. That was about all it took to "teach" two kids, which really amounted to supervising their schooling, making sure they did the work and grading their progress.
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That's one of the issues in the US that kind of puzzled me. We check IDs when you vote. It's not a problem, because everyone can provide the required ID. If it's actually a problem in the US, my question would not be "is it racism to require an ID to vote?" but rather "how racist is our society that significant portions of it can't identify themselves sufficiently to vote?"
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Did he buy tickets with credit cards? Or he just couldn't find someone he trusted to not run away with the $14million?
The latter. You can't buy tickets with credit cards, because people are dumb and must be protected from their own dumb selves.
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Did he buy tickets with credit cards? Or he just couldn't find someone he trusted to not run away with the $14million?
The latter. You can't buy tickets with credit cards, because people are dumb and must be protected from their own dumb selves.
How untrue. We don't protect the dumb from theirselves... We DO have the lottery after all... I call it a tax on foolishness myself, but you can call it being dumb or stupid when people play..
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Stupid? No. Bad at math? Very.
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So you're calling lottery players stupid. You seem nice.
If he's not, I will.
Lotteries are a tax on stupidity. I call them a foolishness tax. Because most who play the lottery are stupid fools who are just wasting their money.
The only valid reason to play, IMHO, is for entertainment value, which is pretty limited. If you want to bet for entertainment, hit the blackjack tables after you learn the rules of how you play. Blackjack is a better deal because the entertainment lasts longer for the same cost, on average.
Re:a gross perversion, no doubt. (Score:5, Insightful)
Lotteries are a tax on stupidity.
People paying for fancy cars is a tax on stupidity because I personally can't see the value of it. People paying to see a play is a tax on stupidity because I wouldn't enjoy it myself. Paying any money at all for a coffee is a tax on stupidity because I hate coffee. Everything you do for enjoyment that I wouldn't personally enjoy doing is a tax on stupidity.
If you don't get any enjoyment from it, don't do it. Other people enjoy it, which is obvious, so why be a prick about it? Very, very few people buy lottery tickets as a financial strategy, so the actual odds are irrelevant as long as it's run honestly and someone shows up in the news with a win occasionally. Personally I spend about $10 per month on lotto tickets. I enjoy it, it's fun for me, so fuck off with your judgmental generalization.
Re:a gross perversion, no doubt. (Score:5, Informative)
Look, sorry if I offended you but you didn't read my whole post...
The only valid reason to play, IMHO, is for entertainment value, which is pretty limited. If you want to bet for entertainment, hit the blackjack tables after you learn the rules of how you play. Blackjack is a better deal because the entertainment lasts longer for the same cost, on average.
IF you get enjoyment out of playing the lottery and have money to spend on such entertainment, have fun, buy your tickets. You know what the odds mean and that you won't win but you enjoy the thrill making sure and finding that if you had matched ONE more number, they would have paid you $5.
However, you are not the target audience of lotteries. People like you don't buy that many tickets. People who are poor, don't have disposable income, who are inclined to make stupid financial decisions are the same folks who more often buying lottery tickets. It amounts to a tax on foolishness and stupidity.
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If the odds are 276M:1 to win $300 million on a $1 bet then you're not stupid for playing.