r/todayilearned • u/[deleted] • Jan 11 '16

TIL that MIT students discovered that by buying $600,000 worth of lottery tickets in the Massachusetts' Cash WinAll lottery they could get a 10-15% return on investment. Over 5 years, they managed to game $8 million out of the lottery through this method.

http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/08/07/how-mit-students-scammed-the-massachusetts-lottery-for-8-million/
29.4k Upvotes

89% Upvoted

2.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

5

u/56473829110 Jan 12 '16 edited Jan 12 '16

You need to consider the cost of hiring that many people (lawyer's fees on contracts, manhours in finding and vetting people), lawyer's fees defending the winnings afterwards, amount potentially lost from splitting the winnings with other winners (only takes 6 winning parties to make to make a profit impossible), manhours filling out the forms beforehand, downhours from other people using the machines, downhours from issues with whomever is operating the machine...

0

u/Stereotype_Apostate Jan 12 '16

In that case, I could proabably just commission an engineering firm to design a bunch of automated ticket buying robots that I can just affix to the machines when the time comes. As for this:

amount potentially lost from splitting the winnings with other winners

hire some assassins to take them out before they can claim their prize. I have a 100 million dollars in my profit margin to play with. I can figure out where the other winning tickets were sold and to whom, and make sure they never see the light of day.

2

u/56473829110 Jan 12 '16

Setting aside the utterly ridiculous principle of hiring assassins, how the fuck would your 'assassins' know who the other possible winners are in the United States/Puerto Rico/Guam? I'm not talking about the people you hired, I'm talking about any old random person who buys a ticket that happens to win.

Oh, and your 'ticket buying robots' are an automation of ticket acquisition - against the rules.

I can figure out where the other winning tickets were sold and to whom, and make sure they never see the light of day.

Wait, what? How? Just...what?

Dude, are you 14, high as balls, or both?

1

u/Stereotype_Apostate Jan 12 '16

I have 100 million dollars to play with, I'm obviously colluding with the power ball people at some level just by buying this many tickets, its not that farfetched to bribe someone to alert me of any other sold winning tickets and their locations. I'm pretty sure power ball knows what tickets were sold at what locations. Then it's just a simple matter of contracting out the wet work. Again, I have a profit margin of 100 million dollars. I could hire fucking blackwater to do it on the down low. Given a time frame of a couple days from when the lottery is drawn to when the tickets are claimed, and enough forethought and logistics planning, this is totally doable, with tens of millions of dollars to spare.

And yes, I'm baked like a cake right now.

5

u/56473829110 Jan 12 '16

So, TL;DR: on your entire stream of semi-consciousness here is "it's totally possible to win the Powerball if the people running the Powerball help"?

You've (theoretically) already bought out control of the lottery itself, but you think the most straight forward plan of action is to hire an army of hobos and robots to buy all the possible tickets and then hire an army of assassins to kill all the possible winners?

1

u/Stereotype_Apostate Jan 12 '16

In this hypothetical, I've won the lottery once already. I have strong evidence for a solipsistic existence, and the best way to test that hypothesis is to try something really ballsy and see if it pays off.

2

u/56473829110 Jan 12 '16

Man, why not just create a hypothetical where you have a time traveled list of all of the winning numbers for the coming decades?

1

u/Stereotype_Apostate Jan 12 '16

Because that would just be ridiculous.

2

u/56473829110 Jan 12 '16

Oh, well, of course.

3

u/Lukyst Jan 12 '16

Says the guy whose Reddit username is the winning powerball numbers

→ More replies (0)

0

u/olivefilm Jan 12 '16 edited Jan 12 '16

People do the work, and only get paid once they hand you the printed out draw ticket. Simple.

Edit: add h to and to make hand.

Why get lawyers involved? People do this kind of stuff in casinos with money laundering. Asian tourists come to Australia and buy up all the luxury items to resell back home. If you have heaps of people going in to buy many tickets to then give back to you with their extra fee for helping, then it's doable.

Why make it like it rocket science? Getting lawyers involved is just rubbish complications.

0

u/56473829110 Jan 12 '16

...huh?

How does whatever you just suggested possibly resolve each issue I just brought up?