essay on lottery scamming

The New York Times

Magazine | the man who cracked the lottery, the man who cracked the lottery.

MAY 3, 2018

When the Iowa attorney general’s office began investigating an unclaimed lottery ticket worth millions, an incredible string of unlikely winners came to light - and a trail that pointed to an inside job.

The Money Issue

The baby-formula crime ring.

It’s pricey, it’s portable, its users need it constantly, and retailers love to buy it at a discount. All of which makes it a perfect product to steal.

The Pain Hustlers

Insys Therapeutics paid millions of dollars to doctors. The company called it a “speaker program,” but prosecutors now call it something else: a kickback scheme.

The Billion-Dollar Bank Job

In 2016, a mysterious syndicate tried to steal $951 million from Bangladesh’s central bank - and laid bare a profound weakness in the system by which money moves around the world.

The White-Collar-Crime Cheat Sheet

How the biggest scammers get away with it.

By REID FORGRAVE Illustrations by FRANCESCO FRANCAVILLA MAY 3, 2018

The file landed on Rob Sand’s desk with something less than a thud. Despite holding the contents of an investigation still open after more than two years, the file was barely half an inch thick. “Happy birthday,” his boss said.

It was not Rob Sand’s birthday. His boss, an Iowa deputy attorney general named Thomas H. Miller, was retiring in July 2014 after nearly three decades of prosecuting everything from murder to fraud. He hired Sand about four years earlier and made him the youngest prosecutor in a nine-attorney team that handled challenging cases all over the state. Now Miller was offloading cases to colleagues. This one, having to do with a suspicious lottery ticket worth $16.5 million, was full of dead ends. Investigators didn’t even know if a crime had been committed. The most tantalizing pieces of evidence were on a DVD: two grainy surveillance clips from a gas station. Sand slid the disc into his laptop and pressed play.

A man walked into a QuikTrip convenience store just off Interstate 80 in Des Moines. It was a weekday afternoon, two days before Christmas. The hood of the man’s black sweatshirt was pulled over his head, obscuring his face from two surveillance cameras overhead. Under the hoodie, he appeared to be wearing a ball cap; over the hoodie, he wore a black jacket. The man grabbed a fountain drink and two hot dogs.

“Hello!” the cashier said brightly.

The man replied in a low-pitched drawl, a voice that struck Sand as distinct: “Hell-ooooh.”

“Couple hot dogs?” the cashier asked.

“Yes, sir,” the man replied quietly, his head down.

The man pulled two pieces of paper from his pocket. They were play slips for Hot Lotto, a Powerball-like lottery game available in 14 states and Washington, D.C. A player — or the game’s computer — picked five numbers between 1 and 39 and then a sixth number, known as the Hot Ball, between 1 and 19. The prize for getting the first five numbers right was $10,000. But a much larger prize that varied according to the number of players who bought tickets went to anyone who got all six numbers right. The record Hot Lotto jackpot of nearly $20 million had been claimed in 2007. The jackpot at the time of this video was approaching the record. The stated odds of winning it were one in 10,939,383.

The cashier took the man’s play slips, which had already been filled out with multiple sets of numbers. At 3:24 p.m., the cashier ran the slips through the lottery terminal. An older man with a cane limped by the refrigerated section. A bus drove by. The cashier handed over his change. Once outside, the man pulled down his hood and removed his cap, got into his S.U.V. and drove away. The gas-station parking lot gleamed; there had been snow flurries that afternoon.

Two years into the case, that was virtually all the investigators had. Sand watched the video again and again, trying to pick up every little detail: the S.U.V.’s make; the man’s indistinct appearance: most likely in his 40s, and 100 pounds overweight, maybe more; the tenor of his voice.

Sand, a baby-faced Iowan who turned down Harvard Law School for the University of Iowa College of Law, had a background that seemed perfect for the case: a high school job writing computer code and doing tech support, a specialty in white-collar crime. His recent cases included securities fraud and theft by public officials.

The ticket in the video was purchased on Dec. 23, 2010. Six days later, the winning Hot Lotto numbers were selected: 3, 12, 16, 26, 33, 11. The next day, the Iowa Lottery announced that a QuikTrip in Des Moines had sold the winning ticket. But one month after the numbers were drawn, no one had presented the ticket.

The Iowa Lottery held a news conference. Phone calls poured in; dozens of people claimed to be the winner. Some said they had lost the ticket. Others said it was stolen from them. But lottery officials had crucial evidence that wasn’t publicly available: the serial number on the winning ticket and the video of the man buying it. One by one, they crossed off prospective claimants. One caller said his friend was a regular Hot Lotto player who had just died in a car wreck — should he go to the junkyard to search through his deceased friend’s car?

Three months after the winning ticket was announced, the lottery issued another public reminder. Another followed at six months and again at nine months, each time warning that winners had one year to claim their money. “I was convinced it would never be claimed,” says Mary Neubauer, the Iowa Lottery’s vice president of external relations. Since 1999, she had dealt with around 200 people who had won more than $1 million; she’d never seen a winning million-dollar ticket go unclaimed. “And then comes Nov. 9, 2011.”

A man named Philip Johnston, a lawyer from Quebec, called the Iowa Lottery and gave Neubauer the correct 15-digit serial number on the winning Hot Lotto ticket. Neubauer asked his age — in his 60s, he said — and what he was wearing when he purchased the ticket. His description, a sports coat and gray flannel dress pants, did not match the QuikTrip video. Then, in a subsequent call, the man admitted he had “fibbed”; he said he was helping a client claim the ticket so the client wouldn’t be identified.

This was against the Iowa Lottery rules, which require the identities of winners to be public. Johnston floated the possibility of withdrawing his claim. Neubauer was suspicious: The winner’s anonymity was worth $16.5 million?

One year to the day after the winning numbers popped up on the random-number-generator computers — and less than two hours before the 4 p.m. deadline — representatives from a prominent Des Moines law firm showed up at the Iowa Lottery’s headquarters with the winning ticket. The firm was claiming the ticket on behalf of a trust. Later, the Iowa Lottery learned that the trust’s beneficiary was a corporation in Belize whose president was Philip Johnston, the Canadian attorney. “It just absolutely stunk all over the place,” says Terry Rich, chief executive of the Iowa Lottery. The Iowa attorney general’s office and the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation opened a case.

In an interview in Quebec City, Johnston told investigators that he had been contacted about the ticket by a Houston attorney named Robert Sonfield. Johnston also pointed investigators toward a Sugar Land, Tex., businessman named Robert Rhodes. A trip to Texas by Iowa investigators proved fruitless; during their several days there, both Sonfield and Rhodes managed to avoid them.

By the time the file ended up on the desk of Rob Sand in 2014, the case had acquired cultlike status in his office. It was spoken about with gallows humor: “We’ll find the guy who bought the ticket ended up getting offed,” Sand said. “That’s what this is going to turn out to be, a murder case.”

Miller had mentored Sand and saw in him a kindred spirit, someone for whom practicing law was a calling. Sometimes Sand’s moral compass was so steady that he came off as a square; his brothers-in-law nicknamed him Baby Jesus. Sand grew up in Decorah, in northeast Iowa, the son of a small-town doctor who still made house calls. He wanted to get into white-collar criminal prosecution because it focused not on crimes of desperation but on crimes of greed. “Crimes against gratitude,” Sand called them.

But all he had was grainy video of a man buying a lottery ticket worth $16.5 million. “We only had one bullet left in our revolver,” Sand says, “and that was releasing the video.”

On Oct. 9, 2014, nearly 46 months after the man in the hoodie left the QuikTrip, the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation put out a news release that included a link to a 74-second clip of the surveillance footage. A few days later, in Maine, an employee of the Maine Lottery opened an email forwarded from his boss. The employee recognized the distinct voice in the video: It belonged to a man who had spent a week in the Maine Lottery offices a few years earlier conducting a security audit.

In Des Moines, a web developer at the Iowa Lottery who watched the video also recognized that voice: It belonged to a man she had worked alongside for years. A receptionist in another lottery office handed her earbuds to Noelle Krueger, a draw manager, and told her to listen. “Why am I listening to a video or listening to a tape of Eddie?” Krueger replied.

By Eddie, she meant Eddie Tipton, the information-security director for the Multi-State Lottery Association. The organization runs lotteries for 33 different states plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. It was based in the Des Moines suburbs. Among the games it ran was the Hot Lotto.

Eddie Tipton cut a big, friendly figure around the office of the Multi-State Lottery Association. He grew up in rural Texas, but while his siblings were outside, he was always in his room, fiddling with his computer. He was a paranoid sort who rarely paid with credit cards, who worried about people tracing his identity. But he always wanted people to like him. When a co-worker was in a bad mood, one colleague said, Tipton would pat him on the shoulder and say, “I just want you to know I’m your friend.”

Tipton built a 4,800-square-foot, $540,000 house in the cornfields south of Des Moines. The house had five bedrooms and a huge basement, including a pool table, a shuffleboard table, a stadium-style home theater with couches and a space he considered turning into a basketball court. Friends wondered why a single man needed such a big house and how he could afford it on a salary just shy of $100,000 a year. In private moments, Tipton told them he was lonely and wanted a family more than anything, so he poured his savings into the house he hoped to fill with a wife and children. But the right partner never came. Instead, he hosted office Christmas parties, and he constantly asked friends to visit. His family, still in Texas, checked on him frequently.

His life revolved around his job. The Multi-State Lottery Association was a small organization, and Tipton felt overextended. He wrote software and worked on web pages. He handled network security and firewalls. And he reviewed security for lottery games in nearly three dozen states. He was putting in 60-hour weeks and staying at the office until 11 p.m.

When Ed Stefan, the chief information officer and chief security officer at the Multi-State Lottery Association, saw the surveillance video, he didn’t want to believe it. This wasn’t just some co-worker. This was Eddie Tipton, a man he had known for more than two decades, since they were in calculus class at the University of Houston. Stefan met his future wife while he and Tipton were on a charity bike ride in Texas; Tipton would later be in their wedding. Stefan helped Tipton get his job at the association. They bought some 50 acres of land together and built adjacent houses. They even applied for a joint patent for computer-based lottery security.

Stefan watched the convenience-store video for the first time after a former co-worker sent him the link that had been released by prosecutors. That just can’t be Eddie, he thought. Then: That’s Eddie. Why is he wearing a hoodie? I’ve never seen Eddie in a hoodie. Stefan got sick to his stomach: His friend, a man with deep knowledge of the computers that ran the lottery, was there onscreen buying a ticket that would be worth $16.5 million. Later, Stefan would tell investigators it was like finding out your mother was an ax murderer. He felt betrayed.

Jason Maher was another friend and colleague who didn’t want to believe what he was seeing on the video. He and Tipton had met at Taki, a Japanese restaurant outside Des Moines that they both frequented. The lifelong computer aficionados and gamers hit it off; Tipton joined Maher’s gaming clan, and they spent hours playing the multiplayer online game World of Tanks. Tipton suggested Maher apply for a job at the lottery association as a network engineer. Tipton, Maher told me, “had a heart of gold.”

So when Maher saw the video and heard that familiar low-pitched voice, he did what a computer whiz does. “That night I sat down — there’s no way Eddie did this,” Maher said. “There’s got to be something wrong.” He put the file of the surveillance tape into audio software, removed white noise and isolated the voice. Then he took footage from security cameras in his house — Tipton had just visited the night before — and compared Tipton’s voice in that footage with the convenience-store video. “It was a complete and utter match, sound wave and everything,” Maher said. The next day, he went to the QuikTrip where the ticket was purchased and measured the dimensions of the tiles on the floor, the height of the shelving units, the distance between the door and the cash register. He used the results to compare the hand size, foot size and height of the man in the video with the man he had become friends with.

“When the F.B.I. guys came in, I wanted to be able to tell them it wasn’t Eddie,” Maher said. “Once I did this, it was like, ‘Well, [expletive] — it’s Eddie.’ ”

In November 2014, state investigators showed up at Tipton’s office. They asked him whom he knew in Houston. He told them about his family — mother, sister and brothers, including Tommy, a former sheriff’s deputy turned justice of the peace near the Texas Hill Country. He did not mention Robert Rhodes, the man who initially passed the $16.5 million ticket to an attorney. By searching Tipton’s LinkedIn profile, investigators found that Tipton had been employed at Rhodes’s Texas-based software company, Systems Evolution, for six years as its chief operations officer. In fact, the two were best friends and vacationed together.

Tipton was arrested in January 2015 and charged with two felony counts of fraud. Half a year later, on a hot, sticky July morning, Rob Sand stood before a jury at the Polk County Courthouse. “This is a classic story about an inside job,” he began. “A man who by virtue of his employment is not allowed to play the lottery, nor allowed to win, buys a lottery ticket, wins and passes the ticket along to friends to be claimed by someone unconnected to him. This story, though, has a 21st-century twist.”

The prosecution knew Tipton had bought the winning ticket. The video, specifically the distinct voice that colleagues had recognized, made that pretty clear. So did cellphone records, which showed Tipton was in town that day, not out of town for the holidays as he claimed, and that he had been on the phone for 71 minutes with Robert Rhodes, the man who briefly had possession of the ticket. Investigators believed he’d fixed the lottery. But how?

Jason Maher, Tipton’s gaming buddy, told them about Tipton’s interest in rootkits: malicious software that can be installed via flash drive in order to take control of a computer while masking its existence until it deletes itself later. Sand theorized that Tipton went into the draw room six weeks before the big jackpot and, despite the presence of two colleagues, managed to insert a thumb drive into one of the two computers that select the winning numbers. That thumb drive contained the rootkit; the rootkit allowed Tipton to direct which numbers would win the Hot Lotto on Dec. 29, 2010.

Tipton’s defense attorney, Dean Stowers, called this the “Mission: Impossible” theory. Stowers characterized the story of a malicious, self-destructing rootkit (“magic software”), installed while two colleagues looked on, as preposterous. His closing arguments referenced a quotation attributed to Albert Einstein: “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you anywhere.”

But Sand called Stowers’s focus on this complicated rootkit theory a red herring. Sand told the jury to focus on the many ways Tipton could have fixed the lottery: He wrote the code. He had access to the random-number-generator machines before they were shipped to other states. You don’t have to understand the exact technology to convict Tipton, Sand argued; you just have to realize the near-impossible coincidence of the lottery security chief’s buying a winning ticket and that ticket’s being passed to his best friend. The prosecution had to prove only that Tipton tried to illegally buy lottery tickets as a Multi-State Lottery Association employee and tried to claim the prize through fraudulent means.

The jury found him guilty on July 20, 2015. He would be sentenced to 10 years in prison, and he would appeal. The State Supreme Court later dismissed his conviction on one charge, tampering with lottery equipment, and the case was sent back to District Court.

Six weeks after the trial concluded, Sand had returned to his desk. It had been a busy summer. But in the back of his mind, he was still thinking about Eddie Tipton. Sand knew white-collar criminals aren’t usually caught on their first attempt. The fact that Tipton’s attorney had demanded a 90-day speedy trial, an unusual maneuver that cut short the prosecution’s time to investigate, made Sand suspicious. His gut said other fraudulent lottery tickets were out there.

One morning Sand’s office phone rang, and an area code he recognized popped up: 281, from Texas, where Tipton used to live. Sand picked up. The caller had a drawl and told Sand he’d seen an article in the La Grange, Tex., newspaper about Tipton’s conviction. “Did y’all know,” the tipster asked, “that Eddie’s brother Tommy Tipton won the lottery, maybe about 10 years back?”

Richard Rennison’s phone rang at the F.B.I. office in Texas City, a port town on the shore of Galveston Bay. Sand was on the line, inquiring about a case that Rennison, a special agent for the bureau, investigated a decade before. At the time, it turned out to be nothing. But the case still stuck in Rennison’s mind. “Hey,” Rennison replied, “that’s my Bigfoot case.”

A man named Tom Bargas had contacted local law-enforcement authorities in early 2006 with a suspicious story. Bargas owned 44 fireworks stands in Texas. Twice a year — after the Fourth of July and after New Year’s — he had to handle enormous amounts of cash, more than a half-million dollars at once. A local justice of the peace who shod Bargas’s horses called him around New Year’s. The justice of the peace caught Bargas off guard: “I got half a million in cash that I want to swap with your money.” “What’s wrong with your money?” Bargas replied.

What’s a justice of the peace who makes around $35,000 a year doing with that much cash? Bargas thought. He called the sheriff and the police, who called the F.B.I. Soon, the bureau contacted Bargas. Federal agents outfitted him with a wire. Bargas met with the man, who pulled out a briefcase filled with $450,000 in cash, still in their Federal Reserve wrappers. As the F.B.I. listened, Bargas swapped $100,000 of worn, circulated bills for $100,000 of the man’s crisp, unused bills. To the F.B.I., this smelled like public corruption, and they went to work investigating the serial numbers on the bills.

One day a couple of months later, Rennison got a call from the Fayette County sheriff in La Grange, a place best known for the Chicken Ranch, the brothel that inspired “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.” The sheriff was laughing so hard he could hardly speak. He told Rennison the justice of the peace was holed up in a Houston hospital with two shattered legs. He had fallen 31 feet out of a tree. He had been hunting Bigfoot.

“My grandmother was raised on a farm in Arkansas where this creature would come in and harass all the farm animals,” this man later told investigators. “My grandmother would tell me all these stories of this animal that harassed my family.” He went on: “I started hitting the woods. It was always that doubt in your mind. And then something happened to me in Louisiana where I actually watched these animals for a couple of hours, and I’ve been hooked ever since.”

Rennison visited the man in the hospital and then set up an interview once he was discharged. The man was a member of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization. He told Rennison he’d won the lottery in Colorado while on a Bigfoot hunt. He was on the outs with his wife and was trying to keep the lottery winnings from her. A Bigfoot-hunting friend claimed the prize in exchange for 10 percent of the money. It all checked out. Case closed.

“Right before I leave, we’re still sitting down at this nice conference table, and he looks over at his attorneys and says, ‘Can I show him?’ ” Rennison recalled. “Hanging off the back of his chair is a plastic grocery bag. He pulls out a plaster cast of a footprint.”

Rennison put the footprint next to his own foot. They were roughly the same size. “That doesn’t look like Bigfoot,” the F.B.I. agent said. “It was a juvenile,” the man snapped. The man’s name was Tommy Tipton.

Now the hunt was on for more illicitly claimed tickets. Iowa investigators noticed that the friend who claimed the $568,990 Colorado Lottery prize for Tommy Tipton, a man named Alexander Hicks, was dead. “We first thought, Whoa — this is our first body related to this case,” Sand says. It wasn’t. Hicks had died of cancer.

The investigators collected a decade’s worth of winners from lotteries around the country associated with the Multi-State Lottery Association. They loaded data from approximately 45,000 winning tickets into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and searched for any connections to Eddie Tipton. They reviewed Tipton’s Facebook friends, pulled phone records and looked for matches with the spreadsheet.

In September 2015, they learned that a $783,257.72 payout for Wisconsin’s Very Own Megabucks Game had been claimed in early 2008 by a Texas man named Robert Rhodes, who wanted to deposit it into the account of a limited-liability corporation. That drawing took place on Dec. 29, 2007 — the same day the winning numbers on Tipton’s $16.5 million Iowa ticket were selected three years later. Rhodes was Eddie Tipton’s best friend. Another hit.

One evening over the holidays, Sand was at his parents’ house working on his laptop, sifting through records, using search commands on his computer again and again. He noticed that a Kyle Conn from Hemphill, Tex., won a $644,478 jackpot in the Oklahoma Lottery some years back. Tommy Tipton had three Facebook friends named Conn. Sand got a list of possible phone numbers for a Kyle Conn and cross-referenced them with Tommy Tipton’s cellphone records. Another hit.

Investigators noticed two winning Kansas Lottery tickets for $15,402 apiece were purchased on Dec. 23, 2010 — the same day Tipton had purchased the Iowa ticket, and the same day that cellphone records indicated he was driving through Kansas on the way to Texas for the holidays. One of the winning tickets was claimed by a Texan named Christopher McCoulskey, the other by an Iowa woman named Amy Warrick. Each was a friend of Eddie Tipton’s.

Early one morning, Sand and an investigator knocked on the woman’s door. She told them she’d gone on one date with Tipton, but their relationship became platonic. Tipton told her he wasn’t able to claim a winning lottery ticket because of his job. If she could claim it, Tipton said, she could keep a significant portion as a gift for her recent engagement.

“You have these honest dupes,” Sand says. “All these people are being offered thousands of dollars for doing something that’s a little bit sneaky but not illegal.” Investigators in Iowa now had six tickets they figured were part of a bigger scam. But the question remained: How did it work ?

Investigators in Wisconsin discovered they still had the random-number-generator computers used for the 2007 jackpot sitting in storage. Unlike Iowa’s computers, the hard drives had not been wiped clean; their software was the same as the day Robert Rhodes won $783,257.72. Wisconsin enlisted a computer expert named Sean McLinden to conduct an investigation that included forensic analysis and reverse engineering.

On Jan. 7, 2016, Sand’s phone rang. It was David Maas, an assistant attorney general in Wisconsin. He told Sand to check his email. Maas had sent him an attachment with 21 lines of “pseudocode,” a common-language translation of McLinden’s forensic analysis that showed part of Tipton’s malicious computer code. The code was small enough that it would not radically change the size of the file, which might create suspicion. And the code hadn’t been hidden. You just needed to know what to look for.

“This,” Maas says, “was finding the smoking gun.”

The smoking gun would help lead to a guilty plea from Tipton. In the plea deal, Sand insisted that Tipton come clean about how he fixed the lottery. This could help the lottery industry improve its security. If Tipton lied — or if another fraudulent ticket were found later — the deal would be voided, and Tipton would be subject to further charges.

Tipton’s program was called QVRNG.dll: Quantum Vision Random Number Generator. In Tipton’s telling, his wasn’t an evil plan to get rich. This was just a computer nerd’s attempt to crack the system. “It was never my intent to start a full-out ticket scam,” Tipton told investigators. “It occurred to me, like, Wow, I could do this, I could be making a living doing this.” He went on: “If this was, like, some mob-related thing, I’d just give this information to the mob and they would go out and win the lotteries left and right. Nobody would know. But that — I don’t have any mob ties. I don’t know anybody. I gave tickets to friends or family.”

More than a decade ago, Tipton told them, he walked past one of the organization’s accountants at the Multi-State Lottery Association. Tipton was conservative, the accountant liberal, and they often ribbed each other.

“Hey, did you put your secret numbers in there?” the accountant said, teasing Tipton.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you know, you can set numbers on any given day since you wrote the software.”

And that’s when the idea first came. “Just like a little seed that was planted,” Tipton said in his proffer. “And then during one slow period I just had a — had a thought that it’s possible, and I tried it and I put it in.” The code wasn’t a brazen “Mission: Impossible” stunt of sneaking into the draw room with a malicious thumb drive. It was a simple piece of code, partly copied from an internet source, inserted by the one man responsible for information security at an organization that runs three dozen United States lotteries.

Here’s how the Multi-State Lottery Association’s random-number generators were supposed to work: The computer takes a reading from a Geiger counter that measures radiation in the surrounding air, specifically the radioactive isotope Americium-241. The reading is expressed as a long number of code; that number gives the generator its true randomness. The random number is called the seed, and the seed is plugged into the algorithm, a pseudorandom number generator called the Mersenne Twister. At the end, the computer spits out the winning lottery numbers.

Tipton’s extra lines of code first checked to see if the coming lottery drawing fulfilled Tipton’s narrow circumstances. It had to be on a Wednesday or a Saturday evening, and one of three dates in a nonleap year: the 147th day of the year (May 27), the 327th day (Nov. 23) or the 363rd day (Dec. 29). Investigators noticed those dates generally fell around holidays — Memorial Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas — when Tipton was often on vacation. If those criteria were satisfied, the random-number generator was diverted to a different track. Instead, the algorithm would use a predetermined seed number that restricted the pool of potential winning numbers to a much smaller, predictable set of numbers.

So Tipton knew what no one else knew: For the Iowa Hot Lotto drawing on Dec. 29, 2010, there weren’t really 10,939,383 sets of possible winning numbers. There were only a few hundred. Late at night before a draw that fulfilled his criteria, Tipton stayed in his messy, computer-filled office. He set a test computer to the date and time of the coming draw, and he ran the program over and over again. For the first lottery he rigged, the Nov. 23, 2005, drawing in Colorado, Tipton wrote down each potential set of winning numbers on a yellow legal pad. He handed the pad — each sheet had 35 or so sets of six numbers — to his brother.

It was a cheat sheet; instead of playing every possible number combination to ensure one combination won, he had to play only a few hundred. “If you want a chance to win, you need to play all of these,” Tipton told his brother. “I don’t know if any of them will win, but you’re going anyway” — his brother was about to go on a Bigfoot-hunting trip to Colorado — and “these have a good chance of winning based on my analysis.

“Play them,” he said. “Play them all.”

On a clear, blue summer day in Des Moines last year, Eddie Tipton, a square-shaped, balding man who was then 54, trudged up the stairs of the Polk County Courthouse. He wore bluejeans and a short-sleeved salmon-colored button-up shirt, untucked and unbuttoned, with a blue T-shirt underneath. His hands were shoved in his pockets, and his head was down. He had accepted a plea agreement for masterminding the largest lottery scam in American history: one count of ongoing criminal conduct, part of a package deal that allowed his brother to be sentenced to only 75 days. Tipton was here for his sentencing.

In statements to prosecutors, Tipton painted himself in the most generous way possible, a kind of coding Robin Hood, stealing from the lottery and helping people in need: his brother who had five daughters, his friend who’d just gotten engaged. “I didn’t really need the money,” Tipton said. The judge noted that Tipton seemed to rationalize his actions — that Tipton didn’t think it was necessarily illegal, just a taking advantage of a hole in the lottery’s system. It wasn’t all that different, Tipton believed, from insider trading, except laws didn’t specifically prohibit him from fiddling with the random-number-generator code. His attorney equated what he did with counting cards at a casino. Tipton wasn’t robbing the casino at gunpoint; he was cheating the house.

The other side disagreed. Tipton was “nothing but a common thief who happened to be handed the keys to the candy store,” Miller, Sand’s former boss, told me. “It’s not a case of Sherlock Holmes’s archnemesis, Moriarty, being a criminal genius. This is just a regular schlub, who is a thief who happens to have knowledge of computer security.”

From Tipton’s point of view, it was complicated. He had done something to see if he could do it. To his surprise, it worked. He said he inserted that code only once; after the code was approved by Gaming Laboratories International, machines containing it were shipped all over the country. He had created a beast and sent it into the world. “You plant that money tree in your backyard,” as Maas, the Wisconsin prosecutor, put it, “and it’s hard not to keep picking at it.”

In interviews, investigators had asked Tipton if he was proud of the success of his code. “It was more like I’m ready for it to be gone,” Tipton said. “It was never my intent to go out there and start winning all these lotteries. It was just, like I said, step by step it happened.”

At sentencing, the judge asked if Tipton had anything to say. After a long pause, Tipton cleared his throat. Family members and former co-workers were in the courtroom. “Well,” Tipton said matter-of-factly, “I certainly regret my actions. It’s difficult to say that with all the people behind me that I hurt. And I regret it. I’m sorry.” As the case was being litigated, Tipton had confessed to friends that he was racked with guilt. At another point during the proceedings, Tipton leaned across a divide and extended his hand to Sand. Sand took the handshake as a sign of respect, as if Tipton had thought he outsmarted the system but the system figured him out. On the day of his sentencing, Tipton told the judge he’d been taking classes to go into ministry. A deputy placed Tipton in handcuffs and led him away.

Earlier in the summer, Tipton sat in a conference room with Sand and law-enforcement and lottery officials to give his full confession, as promised in his plea agreement. Eventually he would head to Clarinda Correctional Facility in southern Iowa, near the Missouri border, where he remains today, Offender No. 6832975. (Through his attorney, he declined interview requests for this article; Tipton did not respond to nearly a dozen emails through the prison email system.)

During a lunch break in Tipton’s hourslong confession, Sand and others involved in the prosecution walked a few blocks to the High Life Lounge. They ordered bacon-wrapped tater tots to celebrate. “Eddie sees himself as much brighter than the rest of the world, the sharpest tool in the toolbox,” Sand says. “It’s the kind of thing I see in white-collar case after white-collar case, people who think they’re better than everybody else, that people trust them and love them, and that no one will be able to figure this out.”

The judge sentenced Tipton to a maximum of 25 years in prison. His restitution payments to the various state lotteries came to $2.2 million even though, according to his attorney, Tipton pocketed only around $350,000 from the scam, the rest going to those who claimed the tickets. (Prosecutors did not believe that, pointing to Tipton’s massive house as well as the fact that Tipton and his brother owned 11 pieces of property either jointly or individually in Fayette County, Tex.) In Iowa, which has indeterminate sentencing, a 25-year sentence could mean Tipton is released much sooner; Sand expects Tipton to be released by the Iowa Board of Parole within seven years.

Sand says he felt a deep intellectual satisfaction in solving the puzzle: “The justice system at its best is really about a search for truth.” But it couldn’t go back in time and correct wrongs. At the end of this yearslong case, he came to a realization: He had grown weary of dealing with criminals. “In so much darkness,” Sand says, “I started to lose my light.”

A few months after the highest-profile case of his career, Sand went up to his boss and quit. He had decided to run for state auditor in the coming November election, so he could make positive changes. If he wins, he will be investigating government waste, abuse and fraud. “There’s no way I would make a move to get away from the darkness of prosecution without finishing this case first,” Sand says. “So finishing it, to me, was not merely satisfying. It was liberating.”

Reid Forgrave is a writer based in Minnesota. He last wrote for the magazine about the fight over proposed mines near the Boundary Waters .

How lotto scammers defraud elderly Americans and fuel gang wars in Jamaica

Assistant Professor of Politics and Policy Studies, Elon University

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Damion Blake is a 2011 Drugs, Security and Democracy fellow who received research funding from the Social Science Research Council and the Open Society Foundations.

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Normally, January and February are high season for the Jamaican beach city of Montego Bay. But this year, an upsurge in shootings and other violent crime has lead many sunseekers to steer clear.

On Jan. 18, Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness declared a state of emergency in Montego Bay and surrounding St. James Parish. Hotels, restaurants, schools and government went on lockdown, with residents and tourists warned to “remain in their resorts” as police and military flooded the streets.

Since then, some 150 people have been arrested , two AK-47s and numerous other high-powered weapons seized and over 80 rounds of ammunition recovered. The 14-day state of emergency was recently extended until May 2.

Jamaican defense force chief Maj. Gen. Rocky Meade says law enforcement’s mission now is to restore peace in Montego Bay by disrupting gangs, particularly “those that are responsible for murders, lotto scamming, trafficking of arms and guns, and extortion.”

It may sound strange to lump in lottery scams with weapons dealing and homicide. But in Montego Bay, these crimes do fall in the same category.

I’m a Jamaican violence researcher who’s been monitoring lotto scamming – a lethal and growing financial fraud scheme in my home country – since as far back as 2013 .

The craft of scamming

In this illegal scheme, Jamaicans pose as lotto officials to convince vulnerable foreigners that they’ve won a big payout. To retrieve their winnings, the caller says, all they have to do is pay a modest “processing fee.”

According to my 2013 study , most perpetrators are young – aged 14 to 25 – and work as telemarketers, remittance services cashiers, hotel employees, taxi drivers, police officers, bank tellers and airline staffers. These professions give them access to the personal information of potential victims.

Largely, I’ve found the fraudsters tend to target Americans, especially the elderly, gamblers, tourists and people who run online businesses. In 2010, Jamaican lotto scammers defrauded US$30 million from scores of victims in the state of Minnesota .

Criminals locate their victims using the contact details on so-called “ lead lists ” gleaned from hotels and call centers. Services like Google Voice and Vonage allow them to mask their location so that their calls appear to come from an American phone number. They may also try to hide their Jamaican accent, though victims often say it’s clear they’re not American.

Fraudulent callers assure the victims of a large lottery prize, but then inform them that a processing fee is needed to access those funds. Using Western Union, MoneyGram or a Green Dot prepaid card, they manipulate their victims into sending them anywhere from $750 to $2,500 in a week.

Scammers may also menace victims who are reluctant to pay. Using Google Earth, they describe the victim’s home and say they’re waiting “out front,” threatening them with bodily harm .

Over time, Jamaica’s lotto scammers have accrued huge fortunes, earning up to $100,000 a week . This criminal enterprise thrives in the Montego Bay area, the heart of the Jamaican tourism industry . There, it is estimated that thousands of illicit entrepreneurs have gotten rich doing lotto scams since 2007 .

New gang wars

Montego Bay also has a long-standing history of gang disputes in poor neighborhoods. So lotto scammers, who generally come from those same violent areas, often use their dirty money to secure protection. They pay criminal organizations to defend their homes and families and bribe police .

Rich, protected and powerful, many lotto fraudsters eventually use their illegal earnings to purchase weapons and manpower, forming criminal gangs of their own and fighting for control over turf in Montego Bay.

As a result, the multimillion-dollar illicit economy is now fueling gang wars, corruption and homicides across western Jamaica. Montego Bay’s crime rate has spiked year upon year and murders have steadily climbed: from 203 in 2015 to 269 in 2016 and 335 in 2017 . Montego Bay’s homicide rate is now 50 times that of New York City .

The rising violence in St. James Parish comes amid a national crime wave. In the first 20 days of 2018, say national police, Jamaica saw 100 homicides – an average of five killings per day .

Last year’s murder toll of 1,616 homicides was up 19 percent over 2016 , when Jamaica already had the 10th highest homicide rate in the world .

Globalization: great for crime

Lotto scamming is, in many ways, just a 21st-century rendition of the criminal violence that has plagued Jamaica for decades.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Jamaican political parties first fueled bloodshed by paying and arming criminal groups to help them win at the polls . In the 1980s and 1990s, those same gangs took up drug trafficking and the weapons trade , taking advantage of Jamaica’s strategic maritime location between South America and the U.S.

Now, since 2006, lottery scamming has become their lucrative new revenue source. Estimates suggest that the fraud’s immense profits were behind approximately 50 percent of the 335 murders that occurred in western Jamaica in 2017.

Ultimately, lotto scamming – similar to transnational gangs like MS-13 and the $500 billion global drug market – is a byproduct of globalization . In shrinking the world, globalization has allowed goods, services, ideas, money and contraband to move easily across porous borders.

It’s unlikely Jamaica’s state of emergency can stop that.

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A large part of the problem is the shape-shifting nature of the crime.

Lottery scams prey on the vulnerable and help fuel violence in Jamaica

The fraud is believed to have been worth an estimated $1bn each year, overtaking the drugs trade in terms of illicit contributions to the economy

Shirley thought she had made a new friend. The elderly Maine resident would don a dress and jewels and wait at the back door for the charming young Jamaican man she had met over the phone.

The couple had developed a long-distance relationship after he called to say she had won $24m US and a new car in a lottery. He appeared untroubled by Shirley’s dementia and asked for a picture of her.

But he never appeared. Instead, he harassed Shirley and her family with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of phone calls in a complicated scam that eventually led her to lose more than $200,000 and her home.

“She would stand by the back door in her jewels, waiting for him to give her her new car or take her to dinner or to show her the house he was building for her,” said Shirley’s niece, Sandra Raymond.

Shirley is just one of countless Americans – most of them elderly and vulnerable – who have fallen victim to Jamaica ’s lottery scam, a criminal cottage industry that is estimated to involve at least 30,000 people. Over the past 20 years, the fraud is believed to have been worth an estimated $1bn each year, overtaking the drugs trade in terms of illicit contributions to Jamaica’s economy.

Last week, the justice minister, Delroy Chuck, signed extradition orders for eight people over a complex scam that defrauded 10 elderly Americans of hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to court documents.

But Clare Hochhalter, a North Dakota assistant US attorney involved in the case, said that the fight against the scammers is just beginning. “There’s much more to do. More offences need to be aggressively prosecuted and offenders need to be held accountable, both in Jamaica and in the US,” Hochhalter added.

Scammers find their victims by obtaining contact details from hotels or call centres, or even online. Like Nigeria’s 419 scammers , they promise a large payout – often a lottery prize – but then tell the victim that a fee is needed to process the cash.

Victims are told to wire the money to Jamaica, or even send it by mail.

Fraudsters have amassed large fortunes by manipulating their victims, some earning up to $100,000 US a week. That kind of money makes the scam stubbornly hard to eradicate.

A large part of the problem is the shape-shifting nature of the crime. To evade controls on money transfers, fraudsters have recently started shipping their earning back to Jamaica in cash. So far this year, five cash-carrying “mules” have been arrested at Montego Bay’s Sangster airport – compared with none last year.

Fraudsters have amassed large fortunes by manipulating their victims, some earning up to $100,000 per week.

“These criminals are remarkably adaptable,” says Luis Moreno, US ambassador to Jamaica. “It’s like a balloon; you squeeze it in one place and it pops up in another.”

Another problem for law enforcement is the perception that – unlike robbery or drug dealing – scamming is a non-violent, even victimless, crime. In 2012 the popular dancehall artist Vybz Kartel, who is serving life in prison for murder , released a track called Reparation that argued the crime was a form of payback for the damage done by colonial rule. “Nuh rob Jamaican, don’t buy gun fi kill man / Foreign exchange is good fi di country,” he sang. “Dem call it scam / Mi call it reparation.”

But the scam’s vast profits have themselves helped fuel violence in Jamaica: up to 50% of murders in western Jamaica can be traced back to clashes over the proceeds of scamming, said former minister of national security and current federal politician Peter Bunting.

“We have had so much violence driven by this, although I don’t know if people connect the dots,” Bunting said.

Corruption is also a factor: police officers are often bribed to turn a blind eye – or tip off scammers when raids are planned.

“They get corrupted by the amount of luxury and the lifestyle they see,” said one officer who asked not to be named. “The scammers try to buy them out and shower them with gifts.”

Why some Jamaican kids want to grow up to be lottery scammers

By David Leveille

Corporal Kevin Watson of Jamaica's Major Organized Crime and Anti-Corruption Agency talks with students during a lottery scamming prevention campaign in Jamaican schools.

Imagine you get a call saying you've won a lottery worth several million dollars. All you has to do is pay some fees and expenses and the money is yours. Sounds good, right?

It must, because scammers in Jamaica have used that lie to extort millions of dollars from unsuspecting marks. They're such a growth industry that Kevin Watson, an investigator with Jamaica's Major Organized Crime and Anti-Corruption Agency, recently found something stunning when he visited a school to warn kids off the scheme: In one classroom of 38 schoolchildren, 17 kids said they wanted to be lottery scammers.

“I spoke with two little boys, two students, who said they wanted to become scammers,” Watson says, “They said, 'Well, sir, we see scammers driving nice cars, and they have big houses and they wear nice clothes and party, and that's what we want.' I think young, impressionable minds like this now see this as a really easy way to make money.”

So what can you tell kids who aspire to be con men instead of doctors, lawyers or even Olympic sprinters?

“I tell them that lottery scamming is wrong. It's a crime. It’s against the laws of Jamaica," Watson says. "I just let them know that the best way is to get a sound education and get a job, a legitimate job.”

But that can be a tough sell in Jamaica, where the World Bank says the unemployment rate is above 13 percent — and perhaps twice that for young people. Meanwhile, scammers are so rich that they've generated some off-the-wall stories about their lifestyles. One suggests they wash their cars with champagne; another says they have contests to see who can set the most money on fire.

“Lottery scammers are usually very flamboyant,” Watson says. “Some of these guys just left high school and find themselves with a large sum of money that they have scammed off these victims, and so I guess they just want to show they're living the high life, living like a rock star.”

Not all of them stay lucky: One scammer named Sanjay Williams was caught thanks to a suspicious would-be victim in Bismarck, North Dakota, who tipped off the police. Williams is now on trial for conspiracy and wire fraud, and Watson is in North Dakota providing testimony. The trial gave him the opportunity to meet some of the scamming victims face-to-face.

“It was heartbreaking, eye-opening to meet the victims testifying about how they’ve been scammed," he says. "Some of these victims are really old, it really touches my heart, and makes it worthwhile for me to fight this even more.”

And as the jury considers Williams' fate — and Jamaican media cover the trial — Watson is hopeful that the anti-scamming message will get through to Jamaican schoolchildren.

“I definitely feel like we're making progress at this," he says. "The trial in Bismarck, North Dakota, can lead to a revolution in how we handle these matters. This will definitely scare people [away] from getting involved.”

InSight Crime

INVESTIGATION AND ANALYSIS OF ORGANIZED CRIME

Deciphering the Lottery Scam Rings Fueling Violence in Jamaica

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Jamaica lottery scams rings target US citizens

Last year’s shocking increase in Jamaica’s homicide rate has refocused attention on lottery scams in the Caribbean island nation. But it is not a uniquely Jamaican problem, with well-organized lottery frauds operating throughout the Americas, costing the United States hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

The total number of killings in Jamaica jumped to 1,192 in 2015, a 20 percent increase from the previous year with the majority believed to be gang-related. Authorities point to violence between lottery scam rings fighting over profits and valuable “lead” or contact lists as the major cause of the spike. This type of advance fee fraud usually targets elderly Americans but also fuels gang warfare in the origin country as rival scam rings compete for resources.

To give just one example, the massacre of six family members in Kingston last October was linked directly to lottery scam rings. Jamaica’s National Security Minister, Peter Bunting, said at the time that this “heinous crime shows that scamming not only affects those who participate and directly profit from it, but those who associate with them,” reported Fox News.

Advance fee frauds involve calling or emailing unsuspecting targets claiming to offer money — in the case of lottery scams, a winning ticket — which can only be redeemed after a fee has been forwarded. (See the Wall Street Journal’s graph below of how Jamaican lottery scams work) Other forms of advance fee scams include Nigeria’s notorious “419” fraudsters , who send out emails offering a range of bogus prizes and rewards, resulting in millions of illicit dollars flowing into the West African nation each year.

While US citizens tend to be the main targets of lottery scams, the scammers themselves can come from all across North and Central America. Jamaican fraudsters are currently thought to be the most pernicious, but two years ago a network of US citizens working out of Costa Rica ran a damaging scam operation for years before being brought to justice. In Jamaica and Costa Rica the scams are an undesirable side effect of a burgeoning offshore call center industry, although scams have also originated in Canada, Spain and even the United States.

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Jamaican lottery scamming no substitute for reparations

November 22, 2017
By Erica Browne

Jovan Lewis, an assistant professor of Geography and African American Studies at UC Berkeley, gave a talk on November 17 titled "Reparations, Deferral, and the Promissory of Poverty" as part of the Haas Institute's Research to Impact speaker series.

Lewis began by acknowledging the unique opportunity to make anthropology more responsible for theorizing poverty, an opportunity, in part, created by the interdisciplinary research focus of the Haas Institute. Here, he described his work as bringing an economic anthropology background, and theories of “reciprocity” and “economics of exchange,” to study Jamaican poverty.

The landscape of Jamaican poverty and the everyday experience of economic deprivation and sufferation, provide the backdrop against which lottery scamming is presented as a critical register of the Black diasporic political economy. Lottery scamming—an intricate criminal activity where contact information lists are purchased and used to extort money—can also be understood as the rationalization of crime as part of the Black experience of navigating poverty.

In the context of sufferation, the Black urban poor respond to poverty through lottery scamming, which serves as a type of reparations for post-colonial exploitation. According to Lewis, reparations are conceived, and sought, as a novel form of reciprocity.

Scammers endeavor to take reparations, and the force of taking creates a “transferability of debt through whiteness.” Central to the lottery scamming as reparations scheme are “crews,” groups of young men who work together, and often meet through the Jamaican school system, engage in casual labor, and live with family within the same poor neighborhoods, like St. James Parish and the Elizabeth Commons public housing.

The economic contours of these neighborhoods, having been shaped by urban renewal policies of the 1980’s, create a figurative culture of poverty that limits social mobility and economic opportunity. Often denied access to viable economic mobility opportunities, “crews” engage in a series of steps to secure economic opportunity through lottery scamming: they acquire data, engage in direct and sustained phone communication with victims, and collect money in increasingly negative ways amid increased scrutiny.

Decades of failed government development, abuses of economic social justice, and a development structure of exclusion produces scamming as a viable means for attaining the economic opportunity and financial resources that might not otherwise be attained.

Parallel to the lottery scamming of Jamaican crews, the CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC) Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice, is presented as another claim for reparatory justice, albeit one that makes direct evidentiary claims to reparations for slavery and its postcolonial effects.

The radical requests and demands made by the Caribbean governments to various European governments connects the colonized and colonizer, and acknowledges the colonial reciprocal obligation of reparations as a transaction reconsidered in the context of slavery.

Lewis describes the anticipated repayment of debt maintaining a contemporary colonial relationship and, in the absence of economic recompensation, it enables for a moral recompensation. Slavery, therefore, is recast as both a theft and a gift, and the transaction upon which a claim for reparations is made.

Lottery scamming is also recast, from a form of theft and criminal activity, into a form of reparation for contemporary American exploitation via its tourism and corporatization of Jamaica. Jovan Lewis describes an important “historization” that skips across Great Britain’s transgressions towards Jamaica, and focuses on America as being responsible for the contemporary economic and social oppression in Jamaica.

For the lottery scammers, a conflation of race and whiteness renders the British and Americans as being “the same white people,” and scamming becomes a justified form of repayment for colonial and postcolonial exploitation. However, within this context, the lack of fiduciary responsibility for poverty results in the ongoing deferral of reparative debt.

In concluding his talk, Lewis describes a “geography of suspension” where both lottery scamming crews, and Caribbean nations, engage in an uneven and unequal compensation sufferation, awaiting the repayment of debt.

The poverty they experience serves as a suspended deferral, and a reminder of the need to maintain patience and a relationship through deferral for any hope of economic recompensation.

Jovan Scott Lewis is an economic anthropologist who works in the field sites of Tulsa, Oklahoma and Montego Bay, Jamaica. His research examines the cultural mechanisms, institutional forms, and social practices through which an unequal living of, and coping with, the economy, its failures and contingencies are understood. Central to this inquiry is an exploration of contemporary inequality, which supports a generative definition of the economy in which poverty and race informs its articulation and spatial organization. Working between the US and the Caribbean, Jovan’s research endeavors toward an understanding of the political economy of inequality and race within the black diaspora.

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Lottery Scam in a Third-World Nation: The Economics of a Financial Crime and its Breadth

2013, Asian Journal of Business Management

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Jamaica is known as a popular Caribbean destination, where millions of tourists visit its shores. However, Jamaica also has the reputation of being heavily indebted and violent. Now infamous for "Lottery Scamming" a type of advanced fee fraud, where scammers swindle victims out of millions of dollars and use the money to fund lavish lifestyles. The objectives of this study are to highlight alternative views of lottery scamming, as a result of years of socioeconomic depression and turmoil and not just a crime. The study presents a background investigation into lottery scamming, the motivations and causes. The study also highlights scenarios used by scammers to swindle their victims. The analysis uses a combination of criminological theories and economic perspectives. Preliminary results show that many people enter into lottery scamming by an intercommunity snowballing effect. Other results indicate that lottery scamming's existence and promulgation is indicative of the geography and employment patterns of Montego Bay. Other views suggest that participation in lottery scamming is as a result of circumstance and people engage in lottery scamming initially based on the need to survive. Other related criminal activities such as murder and gang violence have economic underpinnings, and therefore strategies to fight crime must view the issue holistically.

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‘Scamming is nothing’

SCAMMING continues to chip away at the youth’s view of success and wealth.

As a result, officials reiterate arguments that Jamaican youth need to be exposed better opportunities and real success stories to serve as motivation.

Information technology expert Craig Powe said impressionable youngsters need visible routes to success, road maps and guide marks that help them travel the same path as their role models, as well as positive encouragement along that path.

“If people don’t believe they can make it the legitimate way, and they see others doing things that are ‘easier’ and having instant success, they will decide to go after that,” Powe told the Jamaica Observer in an interview last Friday.

“Children of business owners become business owners, just as nephews who are close become the same. When people do not have good examples around them and encouragement, they look in their community for what makes sense and what they see themselves as.”

While many people continue to fall victim to scams the US Embassy in Kingston has warned that if it seems too good to be true, it is in fact not true.

“Do not believe that you have won a lottery you never entered; it is illegal to play foreign lotteries from the United States. Do not believe any offers that require a fee to be paid up front. Do not provide personal or financial information to individuals or businesses you don’t know or haven’t verified. Do not send any money to someone you do not know. Do not attempt to recover funds personally or travel to Jamaica to transfer money.”

Speaking during a Jamaica Observer Monday Exchange , Dianne McIntosh, executive director of the Citizen Security Secretariat, said scamming has become widespread.

“It’s around us. We at the Citizens Security Secretariat, because we collect the data and interact with teachers, principals, schools, unions, we are able to monitor or track what we call hot spots. We’re using the GIS information to overlay everything,” she said.

“The music is there… ‘ 100 million is nothing to draw down .’ The principals will say, ‘Yes, this activity is taking place around us in the schools.’ But we have to afford a new direction, a new opportunity. You have to give the students new events to look at,” McIntosh added.

The Faculty of Science and Technology at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, in partnership with AddisCoder, Inc, the Caring Hands of Rastafari (C.H.O.R) Foundation, and members of the Diaspora employed by Google , hosted the JamCoders summer camp from July 4 to 29 last year.

The summer camp was geared towards getting children who have never programmed before to teach them how to do so.

The idea to start JamCoders was initially conceived by Jamar “Chronixx” McNaughton and his team after learning about the AddisCoder programme in Ethiopia.

McIntosh said Citizen Security Secretariat, in recognising the work being done by JamCoders, tried to get students into the programme but was unsuccessful due to a lack of interest on the part of the students, she told the Sunday Observer .

“We couldn’t find anybody in the schools who wanted to participate in that. Let us be real, we have a high literacy problem and distrust so part of collecting data and working with people and working in schools is to also be able to see where all the pathways are.

“We can say minister of local government can use this or minister of justice can do something over here, and we bring everybody together. The idea is to bring it to them. Bring the technology. Expose them to what is possible. It is not only scamming [that’s available as an option].”

Powe agreed.

“ Forrest Gump made America believe anyone could be a millionaire. Scamming shows that you just need a call list to do it. We need more visible examples told in the community — in full length — of people who got out and really made it,” Powe told the Sunday Observer .

“Usain Bolt and Shelly have, and will continue to create hundreds of track stars. We need the same clear path for other careers documented and society supporting them at the community level.”

In addition McIntosh said that slowly, culture can be changed by adjusting what’s changing the communities and the risk factors in the communities.

To do so, she said the schools and community will have to be exposed to new things.

“By just exposing the school, the parents get involved. This type of social intercourse, you bring in a lot of different people, a lot of entities into a space. And when people see the enthusiasm and the change and opportunities, they pursue different things. Scamming is nothing. Scamming is short-lived; by 25 maybe you’re not going to be around.”

Commenting on whether some students misuse technology after being exposed academically, director for the Safety and Security in Schools Unit at the Ministry of Education and Youth, Richard Troupe said the possibility of a link does exist.

“I don’t want to boast that this is providing support and not necessarily the implication. I think, though, that the bigger conversation should be that we have a general society that has been kind of condoning, facilitating the scamming and many other things — the glorification of scamming, sex and violence,” he told the Sunday Observer .

“Clearly, what I can say is that these subjects in our classes that are being offered at school probably would have contributed significantly to the BPO sector where so many young people are now transitioning into that area of work, creating some kind of employment opportunity for them.”

Troupe argued that Jamaica overlooks glorification concerning many things in music, then marvel at the outcome.

“And then on the one hand, we see that and then we are wondering how comes we are seeing the violence in our schools. We have to hold our different segments of the society accountable for what is being produced out there,” he said.

Also, the US Embassy in Kingston said the American Citizen Services section in Kingston receive frequent inquiries from citizens who have been defrauded of thousands of dollars by advance fee fraud scammers in Jamaica.

The embassy said the most prevalent in Jamaica is the lottery scam, where scammers lead victims to believe that they have won a drawing or lottery but the cash or prizes will not be released without upfront payment of fees or taxes.

Troupe added: “The other thing that we have to pay attention to is that some of the scammers are persons who leave school… some of them never complete school but they are able to use their skills [for example] when you hear them twang to convince others. So what [is it] about education that is not necessarily reaching… tapping into that creative energy of our boys and girls and redirecting that in a positive way?”

It is also something that as an education system, Troupe lamented, needs to be addressed.

“Are we providing the guidance for our students? Those who, from they are born, they can sing? They might not pass a CSEC subject but you wonder how they can compose music, and the quality lyrics. How do we help to inform the kind of lyrical content and help to channel the creative energies of our boys and girls to more productive things, rather than glorifying those things around us that is not really helping our country? That is a conversation we need to have.”

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Lottery scamming Interesting Essay Topic Ideas

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Lottery scamming now in all parishes

Lottery scamming has become a pressing issue in Jamaica, prompting law enforcement to take drastic measures. Acting Assistant Commissioner of Police, Vernon Ellis, has announced a focus on targeting mothers who knowingly shelter participants in the illicit lottery scam. This comes in response to the escalating crime rate linked to lottery scamming, with firearms often being purchased using scamming proceeds. The lottery scamming trade has not only led to financial losses for elderly victims but also contributed to increased crime rates, with gangs involved in this criminal activity infiltrating communities across the country.

Cops target scammers' moms

Senior cop warns mothers complicit in illicit activity will face court; police move to remove connected illegal guns from streets.

14 Aug 2023/Janet Silvera/Senior Gleaner Writer

ACTING ASSISTANT Commissioner of Police Vernon Ellis is warning that law enforcement will be targetting mothers who knowingly shelter players in illicit lottery scamming. His suggestion that scammers’ mothers will face arrest followed last week’s seizure of several illegal weapons over a 48-hour period in western Jamaica.

Among the firearms law enforcement in the Area One police division removed from off the streets of western parishes are four high-powered weapons, two AK47, one M16 rifle and one SLR – all linked to the spiralling crime rate caused by lottery scamming.

“Lottery scamming money is being used to purchase the guns that are on the streets. They are responsible for the guns coming into the region. And many of the mothers of the perpetrators are registering cars, houses and other criminal properties in their names ... they very well know these are ill-gotten gains,” Ellis, who was one of the original members of the Anti-Lottery Scam Task Force, told The Sunday Gleaner last week.

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He declared that the authorities intend to seize these assets and interdict the mothers for concealment of criminal property.

“The mothers are going to be charged for concealment, once we can prove it. They are condoning too much,” Ellis charged.

Noting that the scammers and their accomplices have become too comfortable buying houses in communities that are depreciating because of their acts, he also warned that other family members will be arrested and charged if they are found complicit in concealing any ill-got assets.

“These scammers are not envisaging the faces of their victims and so they are coldhearted towards them,” Ellis stated, pointing out that his wish is to see between 40 and 50 extraditions in the near future, as they take scammers and their relatives down.

“The Anti-Lottery Scam Task Force and all members of the law intend to chase them out of town,” he stated.

Lottery scamming became prevalent in Montego Bay, St James, in the early 2000s, growing significantly between 2009 and 2010, which coincided with the explosion of the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector.

Scammers were able to access the personal information of persons who do online business and use it to extort primarily unsuspecting elderly persons in the United States, causing untold pain and suffering for the victims.

In the last 13 years, as cash-rich scammers battle for turf and influence, crime, especially homicide, escalated, spreading its vicious tentacles across western Jamaica, including into some of the quietest rural communities that were once crime free.

Eventually, several rural areas in the western region were infiltrated by scammers who have now spread to every parish across Jamaica.

In places such as St Catherine, scamming has become intertwined with extortion. Scammers and gangsters formed an alliance, as the latter were recruited to provide protection.

According to a police source, parishes such as St Ann, Trelawny, Westmoreland, Hanover, St Elizabeth and Manchester have become problem areas, with several high-end luxury vehicles seen parked in the yards of young men with no known source of income.

“We reach a point weh Lotto scam a mash up Westmoreland. It start mash up parts of Trelawny, it a mash up Clarendon. And the whole a St Elizabeth, which was peaceful and had only crimes like praedial larceny, is now controlled by scammers,” the source told The Sunday Gleaner, adding that Manchester was under siege up to last year.

POLICE FORCE INFILTRATED

The police force was also infiltrated, causing Rear Admiral Hardley Lewin, when he was the commissioner of police, to interdict the staff at the Mt Salem Police Station in Montego Bay for their alleged involvement in lottery scamming in 2009.

A year ago, Shelian Cherine Allen, a female officer stationed in St James, was arrested in the United States, accused of being the mastermind behind a lottery scamming network in Trelawny. She pleaded guilty for her involvement.

Over the years, several initiatives, in partnership with international law enforcement agencies, have been implemented to cauterise the illicit trade that has robbed countless elderly Americans of all their assets.

The Law Reform (Fraudulent Transactions)

(Special Provisions) Act, 2013, was enacted to combat lottery scamming, advance-fee fraud and other fraudulent transactions.

The Anti-Lottery Scam Task Force was also established as local and international counterparts work to put an end to the illegal trade, but in recent years it has come under fire for dropping the ball.

BRING THEM TO JUSTICE

In spite of the efforts, including local/international partnerships, lottery scamming continues to thrive, raking in billions of Jamaican dollars for the criminal underworld.

Just last week a Jamaican national, who was previously extradited to the United States from Jamaica, pleaded guilty in the US District Court for the Western District of North Carolina in connection with a fraudulent Jamaica-based lottery scheme that targetted elderly victims in the United States.

According to court documents, Antony Linton Stewart, 39, of St James, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud.

As part of his plea agreement, Stewart admitted that he contacted elderly Americans by telephone and falsely told them that they had won money and other prizes in a sweepstakes or lottery. Stewart told victims that they needed to send money to pay fees and taxes on their winnings. He contacted victims repeatedly for as long as they could be persuaded to send additional money.

At Stewart’s direction, victims used wire transfers and the US Postal Service, among other means, to send money to individuals in the United States and Jamaica who served as intermediaries, and passed on the money to Stewart. In fact, no lottery ever existed, and no victim ever received any money or other prizes. The scheme defrauded victims of hundreds of thousands of dollars, said the US Department of Justice in a press release.

“Stewart is the latest example in the department’s ongoing efforts to root out and deter fraud from foreign locations that targets our most vulnerable consumers,” said the release.

“Each year, millions of older Americans suffer heavy financial losses in the hands of scammers operating in the United States and abroad,” said US Attorney Dena J. King for the Western District of North Carolina.

“Today’s guilty plea underscores our efforts to investigate and bring to justice perpetrators of elder fraud schemes no matter where they originate. We will continue to join forces with our law enforcement counterparts to do all we can to stop these criminals from stealing from our seniors.”

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COMMENTS

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Lottery scamming now in all parishes
"The Anti-Lottery Scam Task Force and all members of the law intend to chase them out of town," he stated. Lottery scamming became prevalent in Montego Bay, St James, in the early 2000s, growing significantly between 2009 and 2010, which coincided with the explosion of the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector.