A lottery security chief is accused of hacking the winning numbers

If you are buying a lottery ticket, you are always playing against terrible odds, but what happens when the odds are totally stacked in someones favour. That is to say they are stacked in the favour of the man who is supposed to protect the system from hacking and external threats. Lottery players in Iowa were playing against a IT specialist who was the security officer appointed to protect the system from hacking.

The authorities in Iowa allege that, Mr.Eddie Raymond Tipton had been hacking the system and the odds to win fabulous amount of jackpot for himself through proxy.

In January, authorities arrested Eddie Raymond Tipton, the Director of Information Security for the Multi-State Lottery Association, a non-profit organization that runs multi-state games for 33 different state lotteries, on charges of fraud. The lottery organisers had appointed Tipton to ensure the security of the lottery system but they found that he was allegedly working to undermine it in his own favour.

The original charges accused Tipton  of enlisting a Canadian man to claim a winning Hot Lotto ticket worth $14.3 million on his behalf. Tipton bypassed the rules of the association which stipulate that those who are employees of the association cannot play the lottery or win any money from it.

Now, according to Lottery Post, Tipton is being accused not just of claiming a winning ticket he wasn’t allowed to have, but hacking into the lottery’s random number-generator software to engineer a win for himself.

He has been arrested and is being tried for forgery and hacking the lottery software. The prosecutors are confident of sending him to prison for a long time.

“There is sufficient evidence for a jury to reasonably conclude from the evidence that Defendant tampered with lottery equipment,” prosecutors wrote in court documents revealed last week.

According to the court documents, the Multi-State Lottery Association’s random-number generator computers are disconnected from the Internet and kept in a locked, glass-walled room that is under 24-hour video surveillance. The prosecutors allege that Tipton entered the room on November 20, 2010, changed the camera’s settings to have it record less frequently, and inserted a USB drive containing malware that would manipulate the results of the upcoming lottery drawing.

It remains to be seen whether the federal judge is convinced about Tipton’s quick fix to get rich at the expense of thousands of other lottery players.