Statistician Reveals Potential Flaws in Scratch and Win Lotto Tickets
A gifted geological statistician from Toronto claims that he may have cracked the code of scratch and win lottery games.
He has taken his case to the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp, who have invited 52 year old Mohan Srivastava to consult with them but insist that "there's absolutely no indication that there's a problem with our games."
It all started in 2003, when Srivastava managed to pick out winning Tic Tac Toe scratch-and-win tickets after getting a hunch about how the games had been made.
According to Srivastava, he realized that there was a pattern of numbers on the face of the cared that would allow him to separate winners from losers with a "high degree of success".
After testing his theory, the statistician realized that he was right in 95% of the cases.
Since then, he has tested his theory on four different varieties of scratch-and-win cards and, most recently, he appeared in the latest addition of Wired magazine.
For the article, he was asked to pick out winning cards from a stack of 20 and was correct in the four out of the six that he picked.
Srivastava has approached OLG with his theory and prompted them to check the level of security of these games, for their own good.
"Being a lottery corporation that's handling billions of dollars, I think they should say 'We need to make sure this is just luck'," he pointed out.
As noted, the OLG has stressed that while it is willing to cooperate with the statistician, there is no problem with its games.
OLG uses Data Analysis and Retrival Technology to help the corporation battle fraud.
