Mike Hartzell got a call in the middle of the night one night in 2003.
It was his old friend, Mohan Srivastava, calling from Toronto Canada.
Mohan told him that he could see a pattern in scratch lottery tickets.
Hartzell’s immediate reaction was to believe his friend.
That’s because he’s known Mohan for over 30 years.
Hartzell knew that when it came to statistics Mohan didn’t make mistakes.
He had told Harzell that he could identify winners from a particular scratch off lottery
ticket WITHOUT doing any scratching.
How was Mohan able to do it?
Mohan Srivastava Early Life
Mohan happily admits that he was a nerd growing up.
As a high school student, he claims that he was actually stuffed inside lockers by school
bullies.
But his smarts didn’t go to waste.
First of all, there was the computer class he took in high school.
One of his assignments was to write a computer program for none other than tic tac toe.
Mohan also had a natural interest in cryptology.
It’s not by chance that he had a friendship with mathematician William Tutte, who was
a famous British codebreaker who cracked a high-level Nazi code during World War II.
He received degrees from MIT AND Stanford University.
Afterwards, he started his career as a geostatistical consultant.
He helps international mining companies figure out where to drill.
The skills he uses for work are the same exact ones he used to figure out flaws in lottery
tickets.
Same Skills
A typical assignment for Mohan is basically him trying to figure out where the gold is.
A mining company has multiple samples from a potential gold mine.
Each sample gives a different estimate of the amount of different minerals that’s
underneath.
Mohan’s job is to interpret those samples.
It all may seem random, as if the gold is just scattered everywhere.
But Mohan knows where the gold actually is ISN’T random at all.
According to him, there are fundamental geologic forces that created those numbers.
If Mohan can get a hold of a sample, he can decipher it and figure out how much gold is
underground.
It’s the same logic that could be applied to the lottery, according to Mohan.
To him, the apparent randomness of a scratch-off ticket was just a mirage, since it’s a mathematical
lie.
Lottery Beginnings
Mohan played the lottery for the first time back in June of 2003.
A few lottery tickets were given to him as a gag gift.
The very first ticket he played was a loser.
But on the second scratch off, a game called Tic-Tac-Toe, He won $3 dollars.
At first he wasn’t interested in the money.
He was just genuinely interested in how the tickets were made since it was so similar
to what he encountered at work.
That was why Mohan started trying to figure out how lottery games were put together.
He had to follow his hunch that he knew the way that Tic-Tac-Toe was made.
Most people just see a bunch of numbers when they look at a scratch off lottery ticket.
But for Mohan, he saw different things.
He could see patterns if they’re there.
For this particular scratch-off game, Ontario’s “Tic Tac Toe” lottery, Mohan noticed it
immediately.
That’s because Mohan understood statistics inside and out.
Lottery tickets are, of course, mass-produced for the public.
That meant that the lottery uses a program to come up with random numbers.
But according to Mohan, that’s not possible.
Because lottery officials need to CONTROL the number of winning tickets, the game can't
be truly random.
He insists that there’s nothing random about the lottery.
Instead, the game needs to just LOOK random, while actually being carefully determined,
according to Mohan anyways.
Fundamentally, he believes that creating uncrackable lottery tickets is extremely difficult, if
not impossible.
He decided to buy a few more Tic-Tac-Toe lottery tickets to see if he was right.
He bought 25 more tic-tac-toe scratch-offs over the next few days, all from different
stores.
It turned out that he was right.
He could pick the winners with over 90 percent accuracy because of what he knew!
The “Secret”
The design was straightforward.
On the right were eight tic-tac-toe boards.
On the left was a box with hidden numbers called "Your Numbers".
It only took a few hours of studying tickets for Mohan to use his statistical knowledge
to discover a defect in the game.
The visible numbers revealed essential information about the hidden “your numbers” that needed
to be scratched off.
The objective is just like Tic-Tac-Toe.
If three of "Your Numbers" appeared on a board in a straight line, the ticket was a winner.
The trick itself is so simple, he taught it to his daughter who was 8 at the time.
Each ticket had 8 tic-tac-toe boards, and each space of the total 72 spaces contained
an exposed number from 1 to 39.
Some of these numbers were repeated multiple times.
The numbers themselves were meaningless.
What mattered was whether or not a number was repeated.
That told Mohan nearly everything he needed to know.
He didn't look at the ticket as a sequence of 72 random digits.
Instead, he categorized each number according to how often it showed up on the ticket.
He was looking for what he called “singletons”, which were numbers that appeared only once
on the visible tic-tac-toe boards.
When these “singletons” lined up three in a row, the chances that the ticket was
a winner was through the roof!
Mohan was able to figure out what was a winner or not without having to do any scratching.
The Decision
Mohan quickly calculated to see how much money he could make from this information.
He concluded that it would be way more hassle than it was worth.
He calculated he could make around 600 dollars a day doing it.
But Mohan made more money as a consultant, and he found that work much more interesting.
He decided to let the lottery authorities know there was something wrong with their
game instead.
He wanted other players to have a fair chance at a fair game.
He figured that there had to be other people who figured out the trick just like him.
Also, he did it as a business prospect as well.
The Lottery may have been interested in hiring consultants like him to make sure their games
are fair.
Lottery Response
At first, lottery officials didn’t pay attention to him.
Mohan felt like they were brushing him off.
They simply didn’t return his calls and messages.
So Mohan decided he would show them the problem in a “live test.”
He bought 20 tickets and put them into two piles, the winners and losers.
He then wrote the lottery officials a letter listing the serial numbers of each ticket
and whether it was going to be a winner or a loser.
He sent the package containing the Tic-Tac-Toe scratchoff tickets and his letter to the official
lottery offices.
Finally, lottery officials paid attention.
Just a short two hours later, he got a phone call from the security team from Ottawa Lottery
and gaming.
Within days, the Ottawa Lottery pulled the game from their retailers.
The official explanation by the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation was that the tic-tac-toe
game suffered from a quote, "design flaw."
But they insisted none of their other scratch-off games were impacted.
Mohan spent the next few months testing other tic-tac-toe tickets around Canada and the
US.
He found out another tic-tac toe game from Colorado was able to be cracked, although
at less of an accurate rate.
He also found another game that he could predict winners with roughly 65 to 70 percent accuracy.
That was another scratch-off game in Ontario called Super Bingo.
The ticket was pulled off the shelves as a precautionary measure.
But Ontario lottery officials for that game were unable to prove Mohan’s theory that
the game was flawed.
Game Manufacturers
In the US and Canada, the vast majority of lottery tickets are produced by a handful
of companies.
These companies do the development, algorithm design, and production of the different scratch-off
tickets.
The state lotteries basically depend on their expertise.
These companies acknowledge that they’re constantly concerned about players hacking
the tickets they print.
They’re concerned about everything from the barcodes on the tickets to the hidden
ink that they use on the tickets.
They’re always trying to stay one step ahead of the people who take advantage of the tickets.
They insist that they’re always looking for new methods of encryption and protection.
But they still insist that all their tickets are secure.
The Game Plan
Here’s what Mohan would do if he decided to crack the lottery as a career.
It’s also his guess on what a criminal organization may do to crack the lottery.
Essentially, it’s a matter of scale.
He’d first create a scanner that would be able to read all the tickets at a much faster
rate.
Then he’d just buy huge amounts of tickets to scan.
Plenty of people buy lottery tickets in bulk to give away as prizes for contests.
Then according to Mohan, he’d simply return the tickets to retailers that weren’t winners.
He had asked several Toronto retailers if they would be fine with him exchanging unused,
unscratched tickets.
No one said no!
Nobody was even suspicious!
But why?
It’s because all the retailers just simply assumed that the games are secure and unbreakable.
For example, the Massachusetts lottery has a history of paying out large prizes to suspected
criminals.
In 1991, famous mob boss James "Whitey" Bulger and 3 other associates cashed in a winning
lottery ticket worth $14.3 million dollars.
Authorities suspected that Bulger was using the lottery to launder his cash.
The problem for criminals such as Bulger is that most lotteries only return 53 cents on
average for each dollar put in.
They had to figure out where to find breakeven or profitable games.
Maybe they have people working around the clock trying to crack the lottery in order
to find a profitable or at least break even lottery game to launder their illegal profits?
No Interest
In the end, none of the lottery authorities were interested in fixing the problems he
found.
One association even threatened him with a lawsuit!
Today, Mohan says there’s almost no doubt that there are scratch off tickets that are
flawed on store shelves.
He thinks that the problem is a big one, but lottery officials don’t see it the same
way.
They think that the manufacturers are always one step ahead of the lottery hackers and
that games are always secure.
Here’s what’s next!