Can a lottery be rigged? The Eddie Tipton case
The only person who provably "beat" a major lottery did not predict it. He programmed the random number generator. Eddie Tipton's story shows where a lottery's real weak point lies, and where it does not.
The fraudster was in the engine room
Eddie Tipton was information security director at the Multi-State Lottery Association (MUSL) in Iowa, which runs games for many US states. He worked on the software that drew the numbers by computer for some games. According to investigators, he inserted code that worked normally almost all year, but on three days a year (27 May, 22 November, 29 December) produced predictable numbers for Wednesday or Saturday draws after 8 p.m.
Tipton did not buy the tickets himself. He passed the numbers to his brother and a friend. Between 2005 and 2011, jackpots were won this way in Colorado, Wisconsin, Kansas and Oklahoma, about $2.2 million in total.
Caught because of an anonymous ticket
In late 2010, a $16.5 million Hot Lotto ticket was to be cashed in Iowa, anonymously, through middlemen. But Iowa requires the winner to be made public. Payment was refused, investigators looked for links to other wins and traced them back to Tipton. In 2017 he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to up to 25 years in prison.
Why our tests would not have caught it
On Lottochaos we check lotteries with statistics: does every number come up equally often? Are there patterns? To be honest, none of these tests would have found Tipton. The rigged numbers looked perfectly normal; they were simply known in advance to one person. And it concerned a handful of draws among thousands. The frequencies do not change.
Statistics can show that a game is balanced overall. Against targeted fraud from the inside, other tools protect you: independent code review, separation of duties, logs and oversight. After the case, US lotteries tightened exactly these controls.
What about European lotteries?
EuroMillions, Eurojackpot and Germany's LOTTO 6aus49 are drawn with balls in machines, under supervision and in public. Tipton-style code is not possible there. For games drawn by computer, regulators require certified random number generators and regular audits. We tested how evenly the balls fall in our article on draw machines and ball sets.
The only proven "trick" against a major lottery belonged to the man who programmed the randomness. And he went to prison. For everyone else: every combination has exactly the same chance in every draw.
Can a lottery be audited?Draw machines put to the testPatterns in chance