> 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.
seltzered_ · 49m ago
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
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.
shkkmo · 1h ago
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?
fragmede · 42m ago
Ah yes, the lottery, a notorious game requiring a large amount of skill to play, and isn't a tax on the math illiterate.
add-sub-mul-div · 1h ago
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.
rdtsc · 2h ago
> (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.
conductr · 44m ago
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.
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.
mistrial9 · 2h ago
> gamblers are mystics at heart
this is deeply offensive, to mystics!
rtaylorgarlock · 9m ago
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
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
Damn, I need to get out more, guys.
this is deeply offensive, to mystics!