He Scammed The Lottery Out Of Millions - The Eddie Tipton story

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Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast 8 min 3 speakers 1 chapter transcribed

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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.

Narrator 0:00

So this guy's about to try and scam the lottery out of $24 million. Now, his name is Eddie. He lives in Iowa, and he's a computer programmer, and he also works for the Multi-State Lottery Association. And he's going to use this position there to enact this wild scam. See, Eddie is actually the director of security at the Multi-State Lottery Association, and part of his job involves designing the software that randomly picks the winning numbers for these lotteries. And so Eddie's been working in this job for like two years and then one day everything changes. Because he's at work and he's chatting with a co-worker and co-worker is joking around and he asks Eddie if he's put his own secret winning numbers into the software. And Eddie is like, say what now? And co-worker's like, bro, you wrote the software so you can set the winning numbers. And Eddie's like, oh, snap, that's right. I'm the one writing the software.

Narrator 0:58

I actually could rig this whole thing and win the lottery and make myself rich. And that is exactly what he's going to do. So Eddie gets right to work, and he starts writing code on the Multistate Lottery Association computer. And this code will basically help predict the winning numbers. Then one night, he's working late in the office, and there's no one else around. So he gets some of those yellow sticky notes and he starts writing down the different sets of possible winning numbers for this lottery that's about to happen all the way over in Colorado. Now the jackpot for this lottery in Colorado is a big fat $4.8 million. So there's a lot on the line here. However, Eddie has a problem. He can't just roll over to Colorado and play the lottery himself.

Narrator 1:46

He's an employee of the Multi-State Lottery Association. It's against company policy for lottery employees to play the lottery. Plus, that would be very suspicious if a lottery employee won the jackpot. So then Eddie has to find someone to play it for him. And what does he do? Eddie recruits his brother, this guy, Tommy. And Tommy is a sheriff's deputy of all things. But Tommy also just happens to be taking a trip to Colorado soon because he's gonna look for, and I'm not making this up, Bigfoot. Yes, Tommy is going several states away to hunt for the legendary mythical creature. I guess he's just into that kind of stuff. So anyway, Eddie hits Tommy up and he's like, hey, while you're out there in Colorado looking for Bigfoot, could you play a bunch of these lottery numbers I got? Because one of them is gonna win. And Tommy, he's like, Aight. Now, while Tommy's out there in Colorado, he doesn't actually find Bigfoot. Womp womp.

Narrator 2:44

But he does buy up a bunch of lotto tickets, and sure enough, when the time comes and they draw the winning lottery numbers, boom, one of Tommy's tickets wins. However, he doesn't actually win $4.8 million, because some other people win too, so the winnings are split between him and some other random winners. Regardless, Tommy ends up getting a cash payout of nearly $570,000. And he goes and he splits it with Eddie. Not a bad payday. Oh, but Eddie's scam is not over yet. That was way too easy. So for the next 10 years, Eddie uses his magic software and he gets the winning numbers and he has another person, Tommy or whoever else he's scamming with at the time, he has that person go to other states and play their lottery and collect the winnings. And they win big.

Narrator 3:34

$22,000 in Kansas. $780,000 in Wisconsin. $900,000 in Oklahoma. Bro is raking it in. Until... One day, Eddie makes a big mistake. Because he walks into a convenience store and he buys one of the winning tickets himself. And you can see him here. He's right there in the black hoodie. Looking all kinds of shady. Hello.

Eddie Tipton 3:59

Can I wave your hand, dawgs?

Narrator 4:02

And also this particular lottery he's playing, this ain't no regular lottery. This is the hot lotto, which has a massive jackpot of 16 and a half million dollars. So of course he buys the tickets and he picks the numbers and the ones he picked end up being the winner and bam, he wins the jackpot. But again, there's a problem. He still can't collect it himself.