Can the Scratch Lottery Code Be Cracked? Here’s a Genius Who Says It Can! But What Do People Think?
A Genius Who Can Crack Scratch Lottery Code
Mohan Srivastava, an old friend of Doug Hartzell called him at 3 a.m. in the morning with the news that he could see the pattern behind scratch cards. Hartzell and Srivastava have been friends for over three decades and knowing Srivastava’s genius mind, Hartzell had simply come to accept that it was true. According to Hartzell, Srivastava could easily identify the winning scratch lottery ticket without scratching it! Srivastava could see certain numbers appear once in the grids and when they lined up three in a row, there were chances that this was a winning ticket.
Once he discovered what he could do, he immediately notified the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp and within days, for the first time in OLG history, the game was pulled out due to a customer-identified flaw. Srivastava is now making rounds on blogs, news channels and forums as the smartest statistician who bested the government, the gaming officials as well as the multi-billion dollar lottery industry! Nevertheless, what do people think? Here’s what we uncovered from the news.ycombinator.com.
According to Andyv,
“The last thing the lottery people want is a lot of attention to the flaws in their games. Threatening the whistleblower would cause that.”
To which rtghnyhjm said,
“I’m very surprised that he wasn’t arrested, prosecuted, served with an injunction not to talk about this and have all his computers confiscated…”
Srivastava believes that any other person could have discovered what he did and, chances are that others have. The son of a Scottish homemaker and an electrical engineer from India he was constantly bullied by bigger boys in high school. He received his degrees from MIT and the Stanford University and soon began his career as a geo-statistical consultant, assisting international mining companies with best drilling spots.
He applied exactly the same thought process to crack the Tic Tac Toe game. It wasn’t until June 2003 when all these factors came into limelight – Srivastava scratched his first lottery ticket and won $3 and as soon as that happened, his algorithm stuffed brain started getting curious…very curious, but then, here’s what people thought, chopsueyar thought,
“The winnings could have been used to buy bootleg DVDs!”
Instead of buying bootleg DVDs, Srivastava went on to buy more scratch lottery tickets and immediately detected the flaw in them. To confirm his suspicion, he bought 25 more scratch lottery tickets from different stores and he was right. There it was. He could see winning tickets. He spent some time to see how he could benefit from his newfound insight, but soon realized it wasn’t worth it.
notyourwork added,
“If you are smart enough to crack the scratch off lottery you already make enough income that cracking the scratch off lottery is not justifiable.”
To which sethg replied,
“… but you can teach the technique to someone who is not so smart. Or you can use the technique to launder money!”
Instead of learning how to launder money, Srivastava contacted OLG, but failed to grab their attention. He bought 20 tickets, tied them into two bundles, a bundle for losing and a bundle for winning scratch lottery tickets. He wrote a cover letter listing the ticket serial numbers along with his predictions for each of them. He put them in an envelope and couriered it to the OLG. Two hours later, he got a call from the OLG’s security team and within days, the game was pulled back from over 10,000 retailers.
For MichaelApproved the solution was pretty simple,
“It seems that a large part of the problem (aside from flawed algorithm) is that they allow people to pick the tickets they want to purchase. If they required people to buy the tickets in order they’re dispensed from the roll, it would bring the abuse down dramatically.
Even if you were able to crack the code you’d have to wait for others to buy the losers before a winning ticket would show up. The flaw in this would be if the store selling the tickets was part of the scam. They’d be able to sell a bunch of losers and pull any winners as soon as it was their turn to dispense. But as with most crimes, the more people involved in it, the harder it is to keep quiet about it and pull it off.”
Although Srivastava spent the next few months testing other lottery tickets, it seemed like neither the lottery corporations nor the ticket printers were excited about fixing the flaw.
