Stupids play now
Anyone who plays the lottery after this needs a stupid test as well all know it's rigged..
Aleksandar Vulovic, czar of the Serbian state lottery, has resigned from his position after winning numbers were mysteriously broadcast on television before they had been drawn. Allegations of fraud abound on every hand following the incident, reports the Associated Press. In what was presented to the public as a live …
Anyone wishing to hide payment "off the books" could hardly pick a worse choice than rigging premium bonds, which provide a clear and very public audit trail leading straight to the "winner". The plan would also require a large number of people to be in the conspiracy, with the accompanying large risk of one of them talking or blackmailing.
No, if you watch the video you can clearly see there's some confusion during the procedure with the draw and the graphics on screen. This wasn't a simple case of the graphics being added out of sync to the broadcast.
I think the "27 initially misread as 21, then the unfortunate coincidence of the 21 actually arriving" theory above seems about right. It looks too hard to fake it with that machine so you could only fake it with tv editing therefore non-live and they wouldn't have messed up the captioning.
I feel sorry for the guy who had to quit, definitely NOT a conspiracy this one...
Not to mention that the air blown balls machine is transparent and I can't see how that could be reliably faked. Not without crossing the line into bizarre conspiracy theories. Given that the police seized everything, they'll find any CGI files.
The 27 misread as 21 and the 21 being a bad coincidence is the most likely explanation. It's unusual, but this doesn't happen every day. It's a cognitive bias to reject the unlikely, replacing it with the even more unlikely.
Actually it is fairly easy if you have access to the machine, just not immediately obvious. You use latex paint to weight most of the balls so they won't be drawn. In 1980 scammers managed to "win" the Pennsylvania Daily Lottery drawing with the number 666 by using this technique.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Pennsylvania_Lottery_scandal
While such a trick may affect the weight and therefore probability of certain balls being "picked", it's unlikely to also affect the order in which they were picked unless you managed quite a distinction in the weights and therefore quite a high weight at one end of the scale - which ought to be obvious.
Wouldn't that be fairly obvious to spot during the actual draw? If you manipulate the majority of the balls so that they won't be selected, surely the draw would be noticeably longer while everyone waits for the 'correct' balls to be 'randomly' selected.
Nah, they don't work at all - I lump them together with such things as dowsing / acupuncture / organic food.
A US gov employee I'm acquainted with tells me that they still use them when they renew employees' access levels (in the more sensitive departments).*
I suspect it's more of a psychological game than anything: a good interrogator will get the truth out of people with clever questioning. The detector, the wires, and the protocol around it are probably just there to intimidate.
*take that as you will: remember this is only a semi-anonymous internet comment!
Not only do they not work but there is evidence that innocent peopel ar emor elikely to show up as lieing through nerves than experienced liars.
What is measured is physiological stress. The hope is that this is correlated to lying but in all but one special case there is no evidence it works and lots that it does not. If you ask anyone a loaded question such as did you murder/rape/steal/defraud etc people show stress.
The only time it can work is if you ask a question that only the guilty prty knows is significant and if the operator of the polygraph also does not know it is significant. If teh polygraph then records a significant physiological change for taht question it is reasonabel to infer the person being tested at least knew the question was significant. This is basically never how it is used, because is is hard to do so, and it is generally a modern form of trial by ordeal, complete nonsense.
Depends on what you mean by "really work".
For the most part they do reliably detect whether or not you are nervous about answering the question. Of course discerning exactly why you were nervous is a whole other question.
Also, the notable exception to their reliability are sociopaths. They'll pretty much pass any lie detector test you give them, or fail if they think that's the optimal path.
"Why not just throw them into a pond to see if they float?"
Ahem, how quaintly medieval. As anyone who understands the scientific method knows, they must be placed on a pair of scales to see if they weigh the same as a duck.
Dona eis requiem. <Thunk>
I've always thought there was no point in running a rigged lottery, since the prize is already a tiny fraction of the money paid by punters, and the loss of trust (and hence bets) should any such scheme ever be uncovered would far outstrip any possible gains.
I guess there I was again expecting humans to be sensible?
Indeed , ive always meant to get into the gambling business. As Mr. Burns put it (re casinos) " The perfect business, people come in , empty their pockets and leave"
Lottery is the most efficient way of relieving idiots of cash.
Casino a close second..
but bookie - where the odds change constantly - that looks like hard work!
The government running the lottery certainly doesn't want it rigged, but other people may very well want to do it
Actually, fixed-odds machines (video fruities, roulette, etc) are far more efficient than the lottery. The lottery is encumbered by the play period (weekly) as opposed to being able to take £20 bets every 20 seconds. It's the churn rate that fucks you up, not the return rate. Casinos also have a much slower churn, so slower lose rate than fixed-odds. It's hard to lose £1000/week at the lottery, trivial on fixed-odds.
Depends on who is rigging the lottery. Certainly there's no logic to it from the State's perspective. But if you're not the state, I can see someone thinking they might be able to rig it to win more than they would ever be paid for doing their job.
In some places the solution to this is that if you work for the agency running the lottery, you can't play the game(s).
Most lotteries are rigged - the UK one certainly is.
For example: Almost every grandparent uses the DOB of the grandchildren for "their" lottery numbers. When there's a "Rollover", the drawn numbers are weighted to below 31, so that there will be a larger number of winners - they don't want one winner taking the £20m.
There are many other manipulations used to get the required results. A quick and crude analysis of the distribution of drawn numbers makes the "adjustments" quite clear.
There was a paper written in the late 80s about "promoting lotteries in risk-averse cultures" - look it up. It's very enlightening.
AC because I used to work for a Lottery company!
Oh, you better believe _some_ people donned their math hats before playing the lottery - and this is the (highly entertaining) story of what happens when even the lottery knows they've been "played" on an industrial scale for years on end, but goes along with it nevertheless...
There was a brilliant scratchcard scam that involved x-raying cards to find winning ones! A newsagent in London and his radiographer brother were convicted of this particular one.
This led to the scratchcards being "metallised" to prevent them being x-rayed. It didn't work - you just need a slightly more precise x-ray unit!
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he did. And much as someone who has paid to see the hugely talented and entertaining Mr. Brown twice, I have to say the teardowns of how he (probably) did it were very insightful.
There was one where a guy basically copied DB and posted a pic-in-pic video of him doing that.
I think my biggest disappointment with DB was having to use some pathetic excuse about the numbers being "copyright" to explain why he couldn't reveal them to us plebs *before* the draw.
The bottom line is it *was* camera fakery.
yeah , the problem with that trick / illusion /whatever is that it inherently proves itself to be a trick because :
a) as you say the "copyright bullshit excuse"
b) he didnt buy and claim ticket
Its akin to a magician saying 'what card have you got? 3 of clubs? yes, thast the one i was thinking of.'
but why would you tell the graphics monkey?
if the ball is going to be chosen according to what you want let the normal means of how it is read and appear on screen happen as normal
"hey we can really use this cheating to cut out latency on the numbers being shown on screen by 0.3 seconds" doesn't seem like a risk someone would take..
Why is there a graphics guy and not a tiny camera taking pictures of the numbers or even better yet just reading data off the balls via nfc or magnets or whatever technology these people have. They must have more technology than relying on a guy to type in the numbers onto the TV..
If you had the degree of control over the lottery needed to fake the machine ball pick (which, if it's to look like the real machine, is Mission Impossible level gadgetry) surely it's easier to enter a winning ticket in the database of entries retrospectively?
the only problem was people *finding out* the numbers are known ahead of time. that's the "flaw" that will be solved by those in charge.
as to the whole "how would they get the live video of the balls picked to line up with the graphic text?" question, the answer is simple:
the video for that is prepared in advance as well.