How Texas officials invited the rigging of the State Lottery

AUSTIN – The New York Times reports that in 2023, professional bettors in Europe were trying to find an American partner to help pull off an audacious plan to buy up virtually every ticket ahead of just the right lottery draw in the United States. Then something remarkable happened in Texas. Officials in Austin essentially blessed the rigging of their own state lottery. “What we had was a criminal enterprise within our government,” said State Senator Bob Hall, a Republican investigating the caper. In a state known for its aversion to government regulation, the successful manipulation of a Texas lottery has taken on deep meaning. The Texas Senate has held hearings. Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton ordered investigations. The Texas House zeroed out the funding for the state lottery in its budget this month. Still, with their winnings in the tens of millions of dollars, the perpetrators remain very much unscathed. Just how the Texas lottery was fixed in 2023 has been explored by news outlets and in state capitol hearing rooms. But less understood is the key role of state regulators. The Times has unearthed new details and video evidence that underscore just how integral the state’s lottery commission was in helping to secure a jackpot. In plain view of the authorities, the founders of Colossus Bets, a British bookmaker, worked with a struggling American start-up called Lottery.com and two other firms to buy virtually every combination of possible numbers and ensure a win that April.

But they could only do so because lottery officials looked the other way when it came to potential violations of lottery rules and expedited the delivery of dozens of new lottery terminals to print out tens of millions of paper tickets. They hit the jackpot, $95 million, after purchasing nearly 26 million tickets for $1 each. The state lottery commission presented it as a win-win: The bettors in Europe ensured every ticket would be sold, a boon worth tens of millions of dollars to the state’s public schools, which get a cut of the proceeds. Editors’ Picks Our 17 Most Lemony Recipes It’s Springtime on Polaris-9b, and the Exoflowers Are Blooming Hitting the Trails on the Wilder Side of a Party Island But some elected officials see the lottery scheme differently, as an international conspiracy with the collusion of state officials. “It just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger,” Mr. Hall said. To high-stakes international gamblers looking for a big play, the Texas lottery was a good bet. Lotto Texas had a relatively low number of possible ticket combinations, around 25.8 million number mixes, and a low price per ticket, $1. (In comparison, the odds of the Powerball are about one in 300 million.) Buying them all could be worth it for a large enough jackpot.