Sunday, January 10, 2016

Conspiracy #2: Powerball

So, no one won the Powerball lottery when the Powerball went from $500,000,000 to $975,000,000 from drawing to drawing.
That means approximately 237,500,000 tickets were sold.
The odds of wining is 262,000,000 to 1.
That means there were about 24,500,000 unused combinations + duplicates and about 237,000,000 combinations-duplicates, about a 10-90 ratio.
So, was the game rigged so they can get the worlds largest lottery jackpot in the world?
Probably not but...
From the Washington Post:
Those sales have soared despite a scandal that rocked the organization that runs the game — a five-year-old investigation into jackpot fixing in one state that grew to include at least four others....
In the end, a Multi-State Lottery Association security expert was convicted of fraud and sentenced to a decade in prison and the man who ran Powerball since it began was quietly put on leave.
Here’s a rundown of the scandal that has been all but forgotten in the wake of Powerball fever.
In December 2010, a man walked into a Quik Trip convenience store on Des Moines’ north side and bought what would become the winning ticket in a Hot Lotto draw with a $16.5 million jackpot, according to court documents.
The prize was unclaimed for nearly a year. In November 2011, a Canadian man contacted the Iowa Lottery claiming to be the winner. A month later, he said he was not the winner himself, but represented the anonymous winner. Later that month, a New York lawyer came forward to claim the prize for a Belize-based trust. No one involved could provide the basic details of the winner, information required by Iowa law. Eventually, the attorney withdrew the claim to the jackpot and the money went back to the states where the tickets were sold.
Investigators never gave up on the curious case and, three years later, released surveillance footage of a hooded man buying the winning ticket in the hopes that someone would recognize him. Several people identified him as Edward Tipton, Multi-State Lottery Association’s former security director.
Tipton was charged with fraud almost exactly one year ago, on Jan. 15, 2015. Investigators argued that Tipton was able to secure the winning ticket for himself through self-destructing software he installed on lottery computers, according to the Des Moines Register. Tipton then allegedly filtered the ticket through a friend in Texas.
Ultimately, he was found guilty of two counts of fraud last July and sentenced to 10 years in prison last September.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/01/09/the-company-that-runs-powerball-had-a-16-5-million-jackpot-rigged-by-a-former-employee/
Was Powerball rigged, I doubt it, but the odds of Powerball being 100% honest, well, it's probably the same odds as winning the jackpot for Powerball.

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