1. I’m a straight and narrow physicist, who, by chance, made the acquaintance of, and hung out with convenience store owners and assorted low lives. (There was a point in my existence where I considered this aspect of lower middle class culture exotic or titillating.) I would like to disabuse all the star programmers and scientists who read Hacker News of any notion that the economic subgroup cited does not have extremely intelligent members in surplus, easily able to outwit state authorities in the crimes (and they are crimes— statistics here are reliable) cited. 2. A key point of the article is that the state’s revenue is not damaged by an unfair distribution of winnings. Indeed, were it to become well known that the lottery was unfair, the revenues do stand to be damaged. So there is zero incentive for the state to match any sort of sophistication on the part of cheaters with the necessary investigative prowess to catch them. 3. Most of the instances cited are clear examples of convenience store employees being able to detect the winning tickets in an undetectable way. This is indeed the case, and is well known in the industry. The article, I conjecture, greatly underestimates the sophistication of the detection methods. 4. I would guess that a majority of multiple winners NOT connected with scratch-off pre-detection are associated with various levels of money laundering. 5. There are times when it is more propitious to play these moron games. But I would defy you to find a situation where the odds are actually in your favor, i.e. where your expectation value of winnings is not negative.