Eddie Tipton was the information security director of the Multi-State Lottery Association. His job was to protect the integrity of the machines that drew the numbers, which meant that he was one of very few people who understood them completely.
The code he wrote did something narrow and careful. On a small number of dates each year — particular days, in particular months — the generator would stop drawing from the whole space of outcomes and draw instead from a small set that could be worked out in advance. On every other date it behaved honestly.
Then it deleted itself.
The Poisoned Calendar
Two draws a week for a year. With the code installed, a handful of dates draw from a small set of outcomes; every other date stays honestly vast.
- honest draw
- 1 in 11,238,513
- tampered draw
- 1 in 200
- advantage
- 56,193×
- tampered share
- 5.8%
On six nights a year the odds move from one in 11,238,513 to one in 200. And the statistics barely move: a frequency test needs on the order of 301 draws to see a rig this rare — decades of a twice-weekly game. Run it against the instruments yourself →
The design is worth understanding, because it explains why he was not caught by statistics.
A rig that operates on every draw is loud. Weight the balls and the frequencies go wrong immediately; the instruments in an audit find it within dozens of draws. A rig that operates on two per cent of draws and produces perfectly ordinary-looking combinations when it does is almost silent. The signal is diluted by all the honest draws around it, and the record needed to see it runs to decades.
What caught him was a ticket.
A Hot Lotto draw in December 2010 produced a $16.5 million prize in Iowa, and the ticket went unclaimed for nearly a year. When it was finally presented, it came through a lawyer acting for an anonymous trust in another country, in the last hours before it expired — a way of claiming money that is legal, unusual, and guaranteed to be looked at. Investigators looked. The surveillance video of the purchase was eventually recognised.
The code came later. Sean McLinden recovered it forensically from a machine that had not been wiped, which is the only reason anyone knows precisely how the thing worked rather than merely that it had.
Tipton was convicted, sentenced to twenty-five years in 2017, and paroled in 2022.
There is a temptation to tell this story as a caper, and it should be resisted. He stole from a fund that pays for public programmes, he involved family and friends in claiming the tickets, and several of them were prosecuted too. The sentence was long because the breach of trust was total: he was hired to guard the machine.
The honest statistical lesson is uncomfortable. The tests on this site would not have found him. They are worth running anyway — most rigs are not this careful — but a page that only demonstrated its own successes would be selling something.