Here’s a long, interesting article in Huffington Post about a couple who developed a system to beat flawed lottery games in Michigan and Massachusetts. Eventually, they got found out, but not before making over $7 million. They reported all their earnings and paid all their taxes. Nobody really got in trouble, expect some store owners who lost their licenses to sell lottery tickets for breaking minor rules. Some other groups of people managed to exploit this same game too.
As interesting as the whole story is, there are a few paragraphs buried in the middle that really caught my eye. There really are people out there who win the lottery more than anyone should by random chance.
A 2017 investigation by the Columbia Journalism Review found widespread anomalies in lottery results, difficult to explain by luck alone. According to CJR’s analysis, nearly 1,700 Americans have claimed winning tickets of $600 or more at least 50 times in the last seven years, including the country’s most frequent winner, a 79-year-old man from Massachusetts named Clarance W. Jones, who has redeemed more than 10,000 tickets for prizes exceeding $18 million.
It’s possible, as some lottery officials have speculated, that a few of these improbably lucky individuals are simply cashing tickets on behalf of others who don’t want to report the income. There are also cases in which players have colluded with lottery employees to cheat the game from the inside; last August, a director of a multistate lottery association was sentenced to 25 years in prison after using his computer programming skills to rig jackpots in Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma and Wisconsin, funneling $2.2 million to himself and his brother.
But it’s also possible that math whizzes like Jerry Selbee are finding and exploiting flaws that lottery officials haven’t noticed yet. In 2011, Harper’s wrote about “The Luckiest Woman on Earth,” Joan Ginther, who has won multimillion-dollar jackpots in the Texas lottery four times. Her professional background as a PhD statistician raised suspicions that Ginther had discovered an anomaly in Texas’ system. In a similar vein, a Stanford- and MIT-trained statistician named Mohan Srivastava proved in 2003 that he could predict patterns in certain kinds of scratch-off tickets in Canada, guessing the correct numbers around 90 percent of the time. Srivastava alerted authorities as soon as he found the flaw. If he could have exploited it, he later explained to a reporter at Wired, he would have, but he had calculated that it wasn’t worth his time. It would take too many hours to buy the tickets in bulk, count the winners, redeem them for prizes, file the tax forms. He already had a full-time job.