Everyone has dreamed about winning the lottery, and most of us assume the game is at least fair. These three stories sound like movie plots, but they are real lottery scandals involving a fortune cookie, a live TV broadcast and the man hired to keep the whole thing honest.
1. Can a fortune cookie really pick lottery winners?
In 2005, more than a hundred people played the lucky numbers from a fortune cookie, and the Powerball drawing on March 30, 2005, produced 110 second-prize winners. Officials expected only four or five, and they immediately suspected fraud.
Winner after winner gave the same explanation: the numbers came from a fortune cookie. Investigators traced the cookies to Wonton Food in Long Island City, Queens, which makes about 4 million cookies a day for many different brands.
The cookie matched five numbers but listed 40 where the Powerball was 42, so all 110 players missed the jackpot by a single number. The surprise payouts still cost Powerball more than $19 million.
2. Who rigged the lottery on live TV?
On April 24, 1980, more than six million people watched Pennsylvania's Daily Number drawing, and the host himself, Nick Perry, had rigged it. The winning number came up 666.
After experimenting with baby powder, sugar and Vaseline, the conspirators injected white latex paint into every ping-pong ball except the 4s and 6s, making the others too heavy to be drawn. A stagehand swapped the weighted balls in beforehand and out afterward.
The fix paid a then-record $3.5 million, but a flood of bets on 4s and 6s tipped off officials. Perry was convicted and went to prison, and in Pennsylvania, people still call 666 a "Nick Perry."
3. Who was supposed to keep the lottery honest?
The man in charge of keeping the lottery honest, Eddie Tipton, was secretly rigging it. He was the information security director of the Multi-State Lottery Association, the group behind multi-state games.
He used his access to install hidden code on the computer that generated a game's random numbers. He eventually confessed to rigging drawings in Iowa, Colorado, Wisconsin, Kansas and Oklahoma.
His downfall was a $14.3 million Hot Lotto jackpot that officials refused to pay after a suspicious claim. Investigators released store security footage of the ticket buyer, colleagues said he looked and sounded just like Tipton, and he was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
