The Connecticut Lottery says in a new report that it was not aware of fraud that was being committed by some retailers until the last stage of its investigation into its 5 Card Cash game. The lottery suspended the game in November 2015 after noticing an unusually high number of winners.
An employee at lottery and gaming terminal maker Scientific Games International had identified a potential way to exploit the system ten months earlier in January 2015, but the company concluded that it was unlikely that fraud would occur.
In its latest report on the problem, the agency now says an investigator saw a practical way that security vulnerability could be used to rig the game in mid-October. But the lottery only discovered that there was deliberate fraud going on six days before it suspended the game on November 12.
Eventually nine people were arrested in the case, suspected of tampering with lottery terminals. One store in Canton was found to have issued more than three quarters of its tickets as instant winners. One in Hartford had also tampered with tickets to issue wins to almost 70 percent of purchasers.
