Summary
Highlights
On July 5th, 2003, Mohan Srivastava demonstrated his ability to predict winning scratch-off lottery tickets without scratching them to executives at the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation. This revelation suggested a potentially billion-dollar problem for the lottery industry, stemming from an inherent flaw in the ticket design.
Mohan Srivastava, a geological statistician with degrees from Stanford and MIT, specialized in finding patterns in complex data, like mineral distributions. While bored, he serendipitously won $3 on a scratch card and noticed the numbers weren't truly random, leading him to wonder if lottery tickets also had an underlying algorithm.
Mohan purchased 10 tic-tac-toe scratch cards and meticulously logged every visible number. He discovered a pattern: numbers appearing only once on the tic-tac-toe boards were always the winning numbers. This allowed him to predict winners with nearly perfect accuracy (10 out of 10 in his initial test) by identifying these 'singletons'.
Srivastava realized his method was simple enough for anyone, even a 12-year-old, to replicate. He calculated that one person could profit over $200,000 annually by identifying and purchasing only winning tickets. More alarmingly, he foresaw the potential for organized crime to use this loophole for massive money laundering and fraud, given that unscratched tickets could be returned.
Concerned about the implications, Mohan contacted the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG) security. After his initial calls were ignored, he sent a package with 20 unscratched tickets, correctly sorting them into predicted winners and losers, demonstrating the flaw with 95% accuracy. This led to an urgent meeting with OLG security.
The OLG removed the tic-tac-toe game, attributing its disappearance to a 'printing error' and offering no public acknowledgment or thank you to Mohan. Undeterred, Mohan expanded his investigation, finding similar vulnerabilities in scratch cards in Colorado, Washington, Virginia, and Massachusetts, and later in another Ontario game, Super Bingo. Despite his efforts and reaching out to journalists, lottery organizations consistently downplayed the issues.
Mohan concluded that lottery corporations prioritized the *appearance* of security over actual security. Industry executives admitted that public trust was paramount, and the alternative to patching vulnerabilities quietly was shutting down a multi-billion dollar industry. Mohan's method, along with other known exploitation techniques like using vodka or X-Acto knives, revealed that the system was fundamentally vulnerable due to predetermined outcomes printed in advance.