Multi-State Lottery Association Data Breach (2005)

The settlement concludes the decade-long saga springing from a computer-assisted scam that Eddie Tipton, former IT director for the Multi-State Lottery Association in Urbandale, ran on the national lottery. Tipton added a secret code to "random" number-generating computer software in 2005 that allowed him to narrow the drawing-winning odds in multiple games from as great as 5 million-to-1 down to 200-to-1. Tipton's scam went undetected for years, and the code was replicated in lottery computer software across the nation. He hijacked at least five winning drawings totaling more than $24 million in prizes in Colorado, Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas and Oklahoma, court records show.