I knew those scratch games were rigged....Happy Drawings.....

Another great story from the folks at Wired.com....Happy drawings.....

How to Pick a Winner

The first lottery Mohan Srivastava decoded was a tic-tac-toe game run by the Ontario Lottery in 2003. He was able to identify winning tickets with 90 percent accuracy. Here’s how it works.—J.L.

1

Look over the card. You’ll be hunting for so-called singletons—numbers on the visible tic-tac-toe grid that appear only once on the whole card.

2

Make a plot of the card, marking each cell with a number that indicates how many times the numeral in the cell occurs on the whole card. If, for example, a cell has a 26 in it and the number 26 occurs one other time somewhere on the card, mark that cell with a 2.

3

All the singletons will now be marked with a 1. If any of the singletons appear in a tic-tac-toethen the ticket is almost certainly a winner: The numbers in these cells will appear under the latex coating at the left side of the ticket. Keep the ticket.

4

Scratch off the latex. You’ve got a winner! Not surprisingly, after Srivastava alerted the Ontario Lottery to his technique, the game was pulled from stores.

The official explanation from the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation is that the tic-tac-toe game suffered from a “design flaw.” According to Tony Bitonti, a senior manager of media relations at the Ontario Lottery, the printer of the game, Pollard Banknote, provided “written assurances” that “none of the other instant games it printed were impacted by this.” As a result, the Ontario Lottery continued to sell scratch tickets with baited hooks. The story of the broken game got little public attention. It was, however, cited in a 2007 investigative reportby the Ontario ombudsman, who was investigating retailer fraud.

You have to admire the British imagination....His only mistake was his "follow-through"....

This story is straight from the Daily Mail in the U.K.....It appears - well, you'll have to read it to believe it:

An immigration officer tried to rid himself of his wife by adding her name to a list of terrorist suspects.

He used his access to security databases to include his wife on a watch list of people banned from boarding flights into Britain because their presence in the country is 'not conducive to the public good'.

As a result the woman was unable for three years to return from Pakistan after travelling to the county to visit family.

The tampering went undetected until the immigration officer was selected for promotion and his wife name was found on the suspects' list during a vetting inquiry.

The Home Office confirmed today that the officer has been sacked for gross misconduct.

Not much else to say here but "Wow"....You can't teach this kind of "special"....