Scratchcard scam sparks worldwide lottery alert

Lottery systems all over the world have been told they may have been infiltrated by a scratchcard code-breaker, it emerged today.

The alert, from US-based GTECH, one of the world’s largest lottery-systems operators, came after a code-breaking incident forced Taiwan’s government to recall 8.3 million tickets.

Bank officials were today trying to understand how someone managed to crack winning codes for a scratchcard lottery supplied to Taiwan by GTECH.

The code-breaking incident spurred GTECH to warn world lotteries of possible infiltration yesterday.

Officials at Taipeibank, which administers the lottery for the government, suspect that someone with a computer engineering background taught others how to find winning tickets. But they have yet to locate the person.

Some lottery players learned how to win prizes of up to 1,000 new Taiwan dollars (€28) by decoding the black and white algorithm of barcodes on the backs of tickets, said bank vice president Richard Yang.

Someone studied the pattern “until he found a connection”, he said.

A seller alerted Taipeibank to the problem a week ago, Yang said.

Auto mechanic Chen Shen-chang twice visited a lottery retailing shop in the central Taiwanese city of Taichung asking to compare barcodes on tickets with markings he had in a notebook.

Chen has become a local media celebrity, but he denies he cracked the code on his own. Chen says a friend taught him but has refused to name him.

“I’d be so happy if he was the one who broke the code,” Chen’s mother told the mass-circulation China Times.

When he was questioned by Taipeibank officials, Chen showed off his skills and managed to pick seven winning tickets out of 11, Yang said.

Still, Taipeibank officials have said that those who tried to crack the code were only able to win up to €28. The lottery tickets sell for NT 100 (€3) apiece and have a grand prize of NT 1 million (€29,000).

It’s unlikely the bank will press any charges because the players have not broken any laws and no one has reaped large prizes from the code-breaking technique, Yang said.

It will cost Taipeibank about NT 8 million (€230,000) to replace the recalled tickets, Yang said.

Taiwan’s finance ministry has demanded that the bank change its codes more frequently to keep the incident from recurring.