How To Win The Lottery! Might End Up In Prison But Worth A Try?


Most everybody wants to win the lottery, and an Iowa man apparently figured out how to do it!

The only problem is, if you want to learn this Iowa Lottery genius’s technique, you’ll likely have to go visit him in one of the state of Iowa’s penitentiaries to glean his Lotto know-how. And even then, this lottery winning method might no longer work, because the Iowa lottery folks have reportedly wised up.

Eddie Raymond Tipton is the man who allegedly figured out a way to bamboozle the Iowa lottery system, and as evidence points more and more down a trail toward Eddie Tipton, Iowa officials are putting the heat on him to fess up about a mysterious winning 2010 Lotto ticket and where it came from.

In an effort to get some answers, Iowa lottery officials are now really holding Eddie Tipton’s feet to the fire by charging him with two counts of fraud, reports the Des Moines Register.

Iowa lottery fraud
Eddie Raymond Tipton allegedly took advantage of his position as a lottery official to create a winning ticket, but now faces fraud charges.

And while some guys named Eddie end up being called “Lucky Eddie,” Eddie Tipton may be anything but, as the charges could land him in Iowa prison for five years, with up to a $7,500 fine. Adding insult to these potential injuries, if Eddie Tipton is in fact responsible for the mysterious winning lottery ticket, he never got to enjoy any of its attached riches because the Lotto ticket was never cashed.

But if Eddie Tipton was able to fix the lottery so he could get his hands on a winning ticket, how’d he do it?

Well, to start with, Eddie was the Director of Information Security for the Multi-State Lottery Association at the time, giving him access to what goes on behind the scenes in the Iowa lottery universe.

According to prosecutors, Eddie Tipton, 51, said to reside in Norwalk, Iowa, bought a Hot Lotto ticket on December 23, 2010, at a QuikTrip market. Given his lottery occupation status, Eddie wasn’t allowed to play the lottery at the time, as per Iowa state law. But that aside, prosecutors then believe Eddie took those numbers, put them on a thumb-drive along with a special computer program, and snuck into the secured room where the lottery-number-picking-machine is.

Unlike the familiar ping pong balls with numbers on them type of lottery number picking, the Iowa lottery numbers came from a random-number picking software loaded on a computer that is cut off from the outside world. Despite rules such as only two people being allowed in the room at a time, and security cameras that are on 24/7, Eddie Tipton allegedly rigged the cameras to just shoot a second of video per minute, allowing him time to go load his magical, lottery-winning thumb drive into the computer.

Of course, the defense for Mr. Tipton says this is all poppycock and that Eddie has all kinds of alibis, and he couldn’t have bypassed the lottery room’s security.

But the prosecution counters that Eddie Tipton’s coworkers were well-aware that Tipton was obsessed with “rootkits,” a kind of specific minded computer program that could do the deed Tipton needed done. One of those co-workers is also scheduled to testify against Eddie, telling the court that Tipton had already built a “self-destructing” rootkit prior to December, 2010.

In the end, Eddie Tipton will be in court Monday to face charges that he tampered with the Iowa lottery machine to create the winning 2010 ticket, and the search for a sure way to win the lottery will continue.

[Images by Scott Olson, Getty Images, and the Polk County Sheriff’s office]

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