not true - this board does not allow new members to post URL links.

Exactly. You only have to read the small print to realize that it takes an idiot to play high stakes on lottery tickets. Scratch offs make the slot machines at Indian casinos look like a sound investment for your kid's college funds. The fact that he spent so much to win that $200K means there is a huge problem hidden there. Where there is smoke there is fire and I would not be surprised if that whole payout check has not already been turned over to creditors and the rest to his local 7-11 for more lottery tickets.

At least now it seems like we finally know why this guy has been ripping people off so much for so long.

He's been "allegedly" ripping people off because he gets away with it. There haven't been any negative consequences/accountability. Just a steady flow of "free" money. There is no other reason than that. Let's not try and blame his alleged misdeeds on the lottery. If your kids steals a cookie and realizes there are no repercussions he is just going to keep on taking cookies.

from the looks of things, Mike looks like he's stolen his fair share of cookies, and ate ALL of them

Come on now! No shortage of cookie lovers at an expo, myself included

Wait...so does he film each and every ticket he scratches at the convenience store? Or are the tickets he buys pre-scanned, before he scratches them, to determine which ones are winners, thus determining which ones get filmed? Excuse me for being lottery ignorant...some would say that's a good thing?

here is exactly what he does...

he goes to the store and like a maniac scratches off all the barcodes, JUST the barcodes and scans them.... it tells you how much you won if it is $500 or under. So on the videos of him with it $500 or under, he knows how much he won. If it is over $500, then it says "FILE CLAIM" only. So he truly didn't know how much was under there.. it could have been $1000, $5000, etc....

He ends up taking all the winners home and filming there.

The guy is a psycho. I have been yelled at by him for doubting he can be a winning lottery player. The scratch offs have the worst payback, even worse than slot machines.

For the amount he played he HAD to be a loser... Before this $200,000 - Ive seen him win $500 so many times its not even funny. I won $500 ONCE in 20 years.... so I know that he must be playing A LOT!!!!!! and if you play A LOT, YOU LOSE A LOT!!

he literally has hundreds of videos of him scratching lottery tickets.... it's his life's passion

He is lying about his winnings. Has to be.

It says right on the back of every scratchy ticket. Payout is usually 20-30%. That means if you scratch enough tickets, the house will always win. There is no magic to scratchy tickets.... the lottery's profit is built into it. They know exactly how many winners and losers there will be.

exactly, I will buy one every now and then just if i feel lucky or something, maybe $50 a year max spent. I actually wish they wouldn't sell them, it is the WORST form of gambling ever.... Slot machines have a payout much better, and thats not saying much.

look, I will say this - I know some good people who became addicted to things.. gambling, drugs, alcohol... but they are GOOD people... they dont rip people off, they dont steal and cheat people out of their money. This guy seems to not even care. He'd rather spend many hours a day on his scratch offs over his business.

The only possible way to up your advantage is knowing what prizes has been claimed and what is left to be claimed based on # of tickets sold. Even then you are going to lose out.

I actually doubt he is in the black, even WITH this win.

There was a story a few years ago how shop owners would know exactly where to scratch to see if card was a winner. It only took a small innocent looking scratch on the card. Ever notice your cards are not mint when you buy them sometimes. Or the roll has a break in it where a card was removed from the center. I don't know if this was ever true.

this is simply not true. yes you need to scan the barcode (or in the old days a serial number), but the only way to know it is a winner is to scan it, and then cash it. it would not be able to be scanned again.

The trick itself is ridiculously simple. (Srivastava would later teach it to his 8-year-old daughter.) Each ticket contained eight tic-tac-toe boards, and each space on those boards—72 in all—contained an exposed number from 1 to 39. As a result, some of these numbers were repeated multiple times. Perhaps the number 17 was repeated three times, and the number 38 was repeated twice. And a few numbers appeared only once on the entire card. Srivastava’s startling insight was that he could separate the winning tickets from the losing tickets by looking at the number of times each of the digits occurred on the tic-tac-toe boards. In other words, he didn’t look at the ticket as a sequence of 72 random digits. Instead, he categorized each number according to its frequency, counting how many times a given number showed up on a given ticket. “The numbers themselves couldn’t have been more meaningless,” he says. “But whether or not they were repeated told me nearly everything I needed to know.” Srivastava was looking for singletons, numbers that appear only a single time on the visible tic-tac-toe boards. He realized that the singletons were almost always repeated under the latex coating. If three singletons appeared in a row on one of the eight boards, that ticket was probably a winner.

The next day, on his way into work, he stopped at the gas station and bought a few more tickets. Sure enough, all of these tickets contained the telltale pattern. The day after that he picked up even more tickets from different stores. These were also breakable. After analyzing his results, Srivastava realized that the singleton trick worked about 90 percent of the time, allowing him to pick the winning tickets before they were scratched.

His next thought was utterly predictable: “I remember thinking, I’m gonna be rich! I’m gonna plunder the lottery!” he says. However, these grandiose dreams soon gave way to more practical concerns. “Once I worked out how much money I could make if this was my full-time job, I got a lot less excited,” Srivastava says. “I’d have to travel from store to store and spend 45 seconds cracking each card. I estimated that I could expect to make about $600 a day. That’s not bad. But to be honest, I make more as a consultant, and I find consulting to be a lot more interesting than scratch lottery tickets.

..nor is it not hearsay.. ??

Sorry, just trying to help. ?

It's funny how a thread like this can actually spur something completely unexpected. After seeing the YouTube channel (which I had no idea existed) I noticed he is saying he is coming out with a book on "lottery strategy". PS: the commentors on that video are waiting with baited breath. So the unexpected part is I got curious about what possible "strategy" there could there be to randomly distributed tickets where you can't see what you are buying. So I took an hour or so and did a whole bunch of research on the net about scratch ticket strategy claims. I was skeptical, and I just needed to see how mathematically there could be anything... Well come to find out, it's a matter of obsessively tracking the odds. There IS an "edge" you can get with scratch tickets, IF you intimately involve yourself with the lottery corporation's prize payout reports. I knew there is nothing MD could put in a book that probably hasn't been tried a zillion times before, so I was right. All of this stuff was all over the net. Including YouTube videos that break down the math and show you. I won't get into the specifics, as you can all go watch that stuff yourself... but it comes down to something like this:

Tickets are issued on day 1, there may be 10 million $1 tickets printed. Five $1,000,000 prizes are randomly placed amongst those 10 million tickets. So OK - your odds of scratching one is 1 in 2 million.

But that's on day one, and day one only.

Here is where it gets interesting... fast forward to 5 months later:

Sometimes situations happen where a prize randomly holds out to near the very end. THIS is what the lottery enthusiasts study their stats for. So let's say the lottery's stats (published and must be public by law) show there are only 500,000 tickets left. But there is still one $1 million prize still unclaimed.

Now you have a decision: IF you have $500,000 to spend on tickets, you are guaranteed the million dollar winning ticket.

But it gets slightly weirder than that - the enthusiasts claim that the odds of buying the $1 million ticket as the very last ticket (when you're literally spending your 500,000th dollar) is actually a 1:500,000 odds... The way they look at it (as enthusiasts) is that somewhere well before that, the million dollar ticket will pop up. You're able to buy every ticket anyway, but if you do it sequentially, you may only have to outlay $250,000 to find that final ticket. Quadrupling your money. Plus they assume they are going to hit some of the $1000 & $5000 tickets in there as well, funding the buydown of the remaining tickets. Even if not, they still consider Worst case, buying 499,999 losers, and literally buying the winning ticket last - still doubling your money.

So they track the stats, watch the payouts, and try to keep a big bankroll going. It's winning by finding those special situations in the stats (and it happens all the time I'm sure, where one of the big prizes lingers to the last 5-10% of tickets) and sheer brute purchasing force.

Yeah, if you have the bankroll, the math works. I can see how the concept works. But there are factors working against you, that may screw up things horribly: The published lottery corp stats are almost always on a delay of 1-2 weeks. The amount of work is tremendous - as you have to somehow buy all the tickets... like what, 10,000 retailers across X states ? Sometimes this is why they stick to more "localized" ticket releases where there is a fixed territory. Plus I assume there are taxes to pay on winnings in the USA ? So while the math may make some sense in a "perfect storm" scenario of a small remaining amount of tickets and a huge buying budget, it sounds like a tough haul to make happen. Because underneath all this, Miss Random at the gas station that afternoon might just buy the million dollar ticket in ONE shot with $1 - and you won't know about it until a few days later when she has done her promo photo & video shoot.

Plus the biggest assumption of all: that you are the only one doing this ! Make this 2+ "strategy people" attacking the final buyout of all the tickets, and it's going to be a nightmare for all of them except one.

I don't doubt that you can increase your chances a little by being extremely aware of odds and how many winners have surfaced. That has his limits. I won't be going out to buy his book until he stops having to rip people off for pinball parts to pay for lottery tickets. Ripping people off is a good sign his system still has him in the hole.

Problem is those scratchers are not usually all in the same location, are they?

No, they are sold throughout the entire state

So trying to buy the last bunch to get the winning ticket is still a crapshoot at best.

Absolutely, I think he just got extremely lucky unless he found out the only stores that had those particular tickets left, I know that not all the retailers sell the same tickets for some reason, or maybe they sold out what they had and they are done printing tickets for that game, my wife will play the crosswords but she can only seem to find them at a couple different stores, I don't know why that is

Not many, if any, $1.00 scratch-off tickets offer a $1,000,000.00 prize. Not even $5.00 tickets.

I don't know where you get your info from but yes, you could scratch in a few minor spots and know if it is a winner or not. I had to fire employees who were doing this. My lottery agent(Illinois) showed us how they were doing it. This was not a few years ago, but over 12 years ago.

And yes, they have changed to bar codes and winning codes are now randomly printed on the ticket.

Example, Illinois $1 Holiday Cash. A winning ticket had codes of $1 = one $5 = fiv $20 = twy $50 = fty . You could do a slight scratch in certain areas and look for one of the 3 letters , if you saw an x, m, a, b, etc you knew it was a loser. The letter codes were always in the same spots.

i would still say NO, because if the big prizes dont go to that particular store at that particular time he plays, he wouldnt win. its random and the more you play the more you lose

an hour or so??? Shouldn't you be clear-coating my Medusa playfield???

Write a book for the kindle.

image_(resized).jpeg

Sorry to say I was one of the people in disbelief because my orders were ok every time. I'm done, and will support any local effort as this d-bag is in my state. New Jersey doesn't need any more crooks.

I hope the next photo of this d-bag is him holding up a booking sign and wearing an orange jump suit when he goes to prison

When I see the picture of this smiling winner and hear the back story it just confirms that our lotteries are just a casino that feeds off the addiction and ignorance of the players. I guess we knew that all along but this sends the point home. I'm not against gambling or casinos but I don't think the government and all their affiliated err cronie...companies should be the ones doing this. Leave it to private enterprise to make some $ and stop pretending to do it "for the children." Yuck.

If you had a legitimate edge on the lottery and were capable of pulling in huge returns, you wouldn't write a book and tell others how to do it. That causes you to lose your edge.

Anyways, some MIT students figured out how to game a particular lottery years ago. I'm highly skeptical you could create a positive return long term on scratch-off tickets.

http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/08/07/how-mit-students-scammed-the-massachusetts-lottery-for-8-million/

unless, of course, you were to rip off the cash to purchase them with in the first place . . .

. . . probably wouldn't add that to the book though.

Not if you continuously steal large sums of money from people to make up for those losses.

Mad amusement are thieves, we have stolen seven months ago 900 € (6 DMD) without ever sending them. Now we have taken legal action
Be careful from Europe.

Let us know if you have any success. Good luck!

I noticed at times in this and other Mad Amusement threads some people saying they had never had any problems and/or how do we know people overseas have ever been ripped off. I think this comment by Pedretti_Gaming in Italy gives proof. One of MANY!

"Mad amusement are thieves, we have stolen seven months ago 900 € (6 DMD) without ever sending them."

Nothing as of yet on the nj.com journalist. If it falls through, we need to keep contacting local and national news outlets now that we know there's interest.

by now he's probably already lost about $20,000 back to the lottery already.

Lottery and cookies

Maybe he stopped gambling after his big win

Maybe someone in the IRS can stop in and visit Mike for a friendly audit, there's got to be at least one Pinsider who works for the IRS. Or maybe a private investigator can go ruffle some feathers in their free time. Or maybe everyone who got ripped off can report him to his domain registrar and hosting company for fraudulent activities. That could potentially lead to him getting shut down online at least. Or if there's any anon's on here who want to be hacktivists, well here's your golden ticket for some pinball karma.

Sad that my first post here, and the reason i signed up after many visits as a passive user is 'Mad' Mike..

Anyway..

Standard M.O. so far with me - excellent communication until he gets the funds, then the shutters come down, no response on email, will not pick up the phone if You call with ID hidden or viewable.

I feel like such an idiot etc. Doing what i can from this end, and i'm in the USA in May for a con, so might take the time to drop in an see Mike, see how 'Mad' he actually is when face to face with a big scary celtic funk warrior, like myself

anyways, word to the wise - steer clear of this Jackass, deal with people that **DO** accept PayPal, and **DO** have an active eBay presence, and **DO** write an email (no matter how short) by hand..