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Comment by ralfn | Hacker News Reader

In Dutch we have a saying: As is the inkeeper does he trust his guests.

I'm always surprised by this pattern of extreme paranoia. In most of the world lottery winners are anonymous, because people wouldn't even consider cheating with this sort of thing. It would just not come to their mind. Perhaps because we don't all default to immediately assume the worst of each other? Because that pattern of thinking makes it easier to morally justify when you screw some one over as well. If enough people think somebody would cheat like this, enough people would have the moral flexibility to cheat.

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Are you arguing lottery fraud is rare? Seems pretty common to me and not just in the US.

How do you even rig the lottery? If the numbers are drawn the usual way (machine, spinning drum, balls) you'd have to use weighted balls, but of course the weights are checked before and after and the balls are in strict custody.

But in the US, where even the elections are computerized, anything is possible.

relevant: https://priceonomics.com/the-mcdonalds-monopoly-fraud/

That link is not at all relevant to a lottery of balls drawn from a hopper.

One famous example:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Pennsylvania_Lottery_sc...

There was a recent one in Canada where the folks running the lottery were arranging for themselves or their friends to win.

Google doesn't have anything pertinent, although there are plenty of cases of the fellow at the lotto counter stealing tickets. That's why you always, always sign the back of the ticket and keep copies.

Rigging lottery is rare.

What is more common is to pay a winner more money for the ticket than the prize, to claim the prize for oneself, as a money laundering scheme. But this is not solved by removing anonymity, as it's hard to prove the scheme without the other person saying anything.

An probable example of this (in Spanish): http://www.levante-emv.com/comunitat-valenciana/2012/02/19/c...

See this investigative article from last week which lays out at least 8 or 10 people who figured out how to rig the lottery for certain types of games: http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/lotto-winners...

They didn't rig the lottery, they figured out how to beat the odds. The former makes it sound like they colluded to change the game, when all they did was play by the rules, albeit in an extreme manner.

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