The Scheme That Broke the Texas Lottery
18 comments
·June 19, 2025rdtsc
conductr
I’m Texan and can say these politicians are scum. They find blame anywhere but internally. It’s all very hand wavy clown club manufactured outrage type of rhetoric.
The fact is the lottery designed a game that allowed this completely legal and compliant “scam” to take place. They need to scrutinize their internal game making math literacy before they blame people for spotting and profiting from their mistakes.
xnorswap
> This idea [buying all combinations] struck Nettles as immensely unfair.
I don't understand why it's seen as unfair, seems like fair game to me?
Edit: Reading further on, it seems this story is more about a person unhealthily obsessed by the Texas lottery than the lottery itself:
> In 2014, Nettles told the Texas Tribune that she was spending fourteen to sixteen hours a day keeping tabs on the lottery.
mitchdoogle
It's unfair because they didn't buy tickets the way normal people do. Lottery machines are supposed to be in regular places of business, like gas stations or grocery stores. Companies called couriers popped up years ago that skirt this requirement by having a token storefront, while their real business is selling lottery tickets on the Internet, connected to physical tickets they print in their store. Secondly, the courier the buying group used requested additional ticket printing machines in the weeks leading up to the drawing, an unusual request that seemingly was not scrutinized at all by the TX lottery commission. So not only did the buying group have to use a method to buy tickets that already is unfair (and goes against the spirit of lottery requirements that tickets must be sold out of normal stores), they had to conspire with a courier to get enough machines to print out all the tickets in time. I think it should be obvious this kind of process is not available to the vast majority of Texans, even those with the financial means to do it, so yes - it is unfair.
pbhjpbhj
A lottery you have to buy tickets for is unfair, it's not available to all [Texans] in the same way. Seems they just extended/exploited that inherent unfairness.
Lotteries effectively exploit those with little hope and similarly restricted means.
insane_dreamer
AFAIK they didn't break any of the lottery rules, and anyone could theoretically have done the same. So no, it wasn't unfair any more than it's unfair that someone else has millions of dollars to buy lottery tickets with and I don't.
The problem lies with the TX lottery commission who draw up and enforce the rules.
kubectl_h
Another article on this: https://archive.ph/DOCG0
Personally I think it's fair if you buy the tickets the way any random person might try to buy all the combinations, which would be to pay people to go buy combinations at gas stations.
But that's not how this worked in this case:
> The Texas Lottery Commission helped in several ways behind the scenes. Prior to the draw, it filled rush orders from the retailers requesting dozens of extra terminals — even though three had sold few, if any tickets in the previous months.
>The agency also did not challenge organizers’ method of rapidly entering millions of ticket orders into state terminals. Their use of personal iPads and preprogrammed QR codes appeared to skirt lottery regulations.
If the lotto commission is fine with groups purchasing the lottery, they should make the mechanism for purchasing the lottery equally available to everyone.
seltzered_
There's a number of stories like this, notably this reminded me of the Press your Luck Scandal where Michael Larson obsessively recorded and watched a games how to find patterns: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Your_Luck_scandal
shkkmo
Far more people than Nettles think this was unfair and there were definitely laws broken and skirted. That is why there is a scandal.
> In the aftermath of the 2023 bulk buy, Texas politicians put much of the blame on the couriers. The couriers, for their part, have argued that they’re being scapegoated to deflect attention away from broader issues within the Texas Lottery Commission. In any event, the freewheeling atmosphere in Texas seems to have attracted businesses with questionable pedigrees. Lottery.com, which ended up managing the on-the-ground logistics for the 2023 lottery plan, relocated from California to Texas in 2017.
> Lottery.com seems to have struggled, initially. One potential investor, who visited the Lottery.com’s offices in Austin, told Bloomberg Tax, “I said, this isn’t a corporate office; this is a failed 7-Eleven with three goddamn machines.” In 2022, an investigation found that the company had sold more than half a million tickets to out-of-state players, which is illegal. Three top executives left the company. Two of them, Ryan Dickinson and Matt Clemenson, have since pleaded guilty to separate securities-fraud charges. That same year, the company stopped selling lottery tickets, its license as a lottery retailer in Texas was suspended, and its app was removed from the Apple and Google stores.
Texas law prohibits sales to out-of-state players. Do you really not see how a foriegn backer using a sketchy third party and sketchy techniques to purchase tickets and make profit off Texans who play for fun is clearly unfair?
brookst
I mean Texas could pass a law that nobody whose name starts with M can play, but I don’t see how someone with that affliction managing to procure tickets would be unfair.
fragmede
Ah yes, the lottery, a notorious game requiring a large amount of skill to play, and isn't a tax on the math illiterate.
shkkmo
> a notorious game requiring a large amount of skill to play, and isn't a tax on the math illiterate.
Nobody but you mentioned skill. Plenty of mathematically literate people play the lottery for fun, knowing the the expected value is a loss. I personally oppose these types of state operated lotteries as regressive forms of taxation, but if they exist, they shouldn't serve the purpose of allowing capital (especially foreign capital) to extract even more money from citizens.
add-sub-mul-div
This one is paywalled but when I read about it earlier, the problem was that the Texas officials had allowed these people to break the rules of the lottery in order to implement the scheme. So they were given an edge over people who were following the rules.
canyp
When I read the title, I thought this was about the Scheme programming language, and how maybe a bug in the garbage collector or something may have broken the lottery.
Damn, I need to get out more, guys.
patrickmay
I would like to read the article you describe.
mistrial9
> gamblers are mystics at heart
this is deeply offensive, to mystics!
rtaylorgarlock
After spending a few days in Vegas recently, I can confirm whoever thinks "gamblers are mystics at heart" only knows either a tiny bit about gambling or mysticism, but not both
> (The Houston Chronicle eventually reported that a London-based gambling syndicate had bankrolled the operation.)
> Two years later, it has become a full-blown scandal. The Texas Rangers have been called in to investigate what Dan Patrick, Texas’s lieutenant governor, has called “the biggest theft from the people of Texas in the history of Texas.”
Someone from London is robbing our taxpayers, that's not allowed. Only we should be able to rob them!
It's always interesting to read how some of these lotteries are sponsoring "math education". They officially acknowledge it's a tax on math illiteracy.