<fontfamily><param>Times New Roman</param><bigger><bigger>FROM
NYTIMES:Powerball lottery officials suspected fraud: how could 110
players in the March 30 drawing get five of the six numbers right?
That made them all second-prize winners, and considering the number of
tickets sold in the 29 states where the game is played, there should
have been only four or five.
But from state after state they kept coming in, the
one-in-three-million combination of 22, 28, 32, 33, 39.
It took some time before they had their answer: the players got their
numbers inside fortune cookies, and all the cookies came from the same
factory in Long Island City, Queens.
Chuck Strutt, executive director of the Multi-State Lottery
Association, which runs Powerball, said on Monday that the panic began
at 11:30 p.m. March 30 when he got a call from a worried staff member.
The second-place winners were due $100,000 to $500,000 each,
depending on how much they had bet, so paying all 110 meant almost $19
million in unexpected payouts, Mr. Strutt said. (The lottery keeps a
$25 million reserve for odd situations.)
Of course, it could have been worse. The 110 had picked the wrong
sixth number – 40, not 42 – and would have been first-place winners if
they did.
“We didn’t sleep a lot that night,” Mr. Strutt said. “Is there someone
trying to cheat the system?”
He added: “We had to look at everything to do with humans: television
shows, pattern plays, lottery columns.”
Earlier that month, an ABC television show, “Lost,” included a
sequence of winning lottery numbers. The combination didn’t match the
Powerball numbers, though hundreds of people had played it: 4, 8, 15,
16, 23 and 42. Numbers on a Powerball ticket in a recent episode of a
soap opera, “The Young and the Restless,” didn’t match, either. Nor
did the winning numbers form a pattern on the lottery grid, like a
cross or a diagonal. Then the winners started arriving at lottery
offices.
“Our first winner came in and said it was a fortune cookie,” said
Rebecca Paul, chief executive of the Tennessee Lottery. “The second
winner came in and said it was a fortune cookie. The third winner came
in and said it was a fortune cookie.”
Investigators visited dozens of Chinese restaurants, takeouts and
buffets. Then they called fortune cookie distributors and learned that
many different brands of fortune cookies come from the same Long
Island City factory, which is owned by Wonton Food and churns out four
million a day.
“That’s ours,” said Derrick Wong, of Wonton Food, when shown a
picture of a winner’s cookie slip. “That’s very nice, 110 people won
the lottery from the numbers.”
The same number combinations go out in thousands of cookies a day. The
workers put numbers in a bowl and pick them. “We are not going to do
the bowl anymore; we are going to have a computer,” Mr. Wong said.
“It’s more efficient.”</bigger></bigger></fontfamily>