In 2023, professional bettors in Europe were trying to find an American partner to help pull off an audacious plan to buy up virtually every ticket ahead of just the right lottery draw in the United States.
Then something remarkable happened in Texas. Officials in Austin essentially blessed the rigging of their own state lottery.
“What we had was a criminal enterprise within our government,” said State Senator Bob Hall, a Republican investigating the caper.
In a state known for its aversion to government regulation, the successful manipulation of a Texas lottery has taken on deep meaning. The Texas Senate has held hearings. Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton ordered investigations. The Texas House zeroed out the funding for the state lottery in its budget this month.
Still, with their winnings in the tens of millions of dollars, the perpetrators remain very much unscathed. And as the unsavory details have come out — storefronts posing as retailers spitting out lottery tickets, texts between ticket printers and a former drug smuggler, a winner hiding behind a Delaware-based shell company — the escapade underscored a pervasive sense in Texas, and in America, that just about everything is rigged.
Just how the Texas lottery was fixed in 2023 has been explored by news outlets and in state capitol hearing rooms. But less understood is the key role of state regulators. The Times has unearthed new details and video evidence that underscore just how integral the state’s lottery commission was in helping to secure a jackpot.
In plain view of the authorities, the founders of Colossus Bets, a British bookmaker, worked with a struggling American start-up called Lottery.com and two other firms to buy virtually every combination of possible numbers and ensure a win that April.
But they could only do so because lottery officials looked the other way when it came to potential violations of lottery rules and expedited the delivery of dozens of new lottery terminals to print out tens of millions of paper tickets.
They hit the jackpot, $95 million, after purchasing nearly 26 million tickets for $1 each.
The state lottery commission presented it as a win-win: The bettors in Europe ensured every ticket would be sold, a boon worth tens of millions of dollars to the state’s public schools, which get a cut of the proceeds.
But some elected officials see the lottery scheme differently, as an international conspiracy with the collusion of state officials.
“It just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger,” Mr. Hall said.
‘They deceived players.’
To high-stakes international gamblers looking for a big play, the Texas lottery was a good bet. Lotto Texas had a relatively low number of possible ticket combinations, around 25.8 million number mixes, and a low price per ticket, $1. (In comparison, the odds of the Powerball are about one in 300 million.) Buying them all could be worth it for a large enough jackpot.
Crucially, state regulators, looking to increase sales, had become permissive of companies that helped remote players buy tickets, known as “lottery couriers.”
Still, executives at Lottery.com — an internet start-up founded to help players get access to lottery tickets around the world — were leery when European bettors came with their proposal to buy nearly all the tickets. They asked the state for permission before agreeing to take part.
“We were very surprised when the answer was yes,” Greg Potts, a Lottery.com executive, would later say at a State Senate hearing.
Before jumping in, they watched the lottery jackpot grow slowly but steadily in early 2023 as one draw after another failed to produce a winner. The draws, three times a week, brought only modest interest from lottery players, who bought around one or two million tickets on each draw.
The bettors saw their chance, and their intervention showed in the jackpot, which rose from around $74 million to $95 million in a matter of days, as millions of additional tickets were sold.
Dawn Nettles, a longtime lottery player who publishes a website on the Texas lottery, understood there hadn’t been a sudden burst of enthusiasm from ordinary Texans. Someone was buying all the tickets.
“More than likely, there will be a winner tonight,” she wrote on her site in late April 2023.
And there was.
The Texas Lottery Commission heralded the win, the third largest in state history, which helped raise around $50 million for the state’s public schools out of $138 million in sales over the life of the jackpot run.
Gary Grief, the commission’s executive director at the time, acknowledged in a news release that “purchasing groups” had stepped in, ensuring that more than 99 percent of the number combinations had been sold. There is “no prohibition on these types of purchases,” he added.
The winning ticket had been sold at a store in the Dallas suburb of Colleyville, operated by a company called Lottery Now.
But it wasn’t the usual convenience store where lottery tickets are sold. It was a storefront office packed with more than a dozen lottery terminals, used to pick lottery numbers and print tickets. And the winner came forward anonymously: a recently formed Delaware-based company named Rook TX.
The Colleyville storefront alone had printed nearly $11 million worth of $1 tickets in the span of 72 hours, about four a second. (Each ticket can have up to 10 plays on it.) Three other storefronts printed another $14.8 million worth with the same speed.
For years, the commission had welcomed couriers as an efficient way to boost revenue, even though state law had been crafted to require in-person purchases. A state audit observed that Mr. Grief “seemed quite comfortable operating in the gray areas.”
Republican leaders, including the lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, now see couriers as scofflaws. Mr. Grief resigned last year and promised to cooperate.
“Gary adamantly denies being part of any dishonest, fraudulent or illegal scheme,” Sam Bassett, Mr. Grief’s lawyer, said in a statement.
The victims were the few ordinary Texans who bought tickets that April, thinking they had just as much chance as anyone else to win the draw.
“They deceived players,” Ms. Nettles said.
‘A crazy 72 hours’
Among the reasons people don’t regularly go around buying up enough lottery combinations to guarantee a win is that it’s tough to do.
But it is not impossible.
A few years ago, a group of Princeton University graduates discovered how to beat the odds in scratch-off games across several states. A retired Michigan couple discovered a loophole in that state’s lottery and won millions.
In Europe, so-called lottery syndicates gather purchasers to increase the odds of winning.
The Texas bulk buy and the statistical calculations behind it were the brainchild of a London-based firm that advises bettors, White Swan Data, according to a person familiar with the operation, who requested anonymity because of the numerous lawsuits and investigations. The firm’s founder, Bernard Marantelli, also started Colossus Bets with Zeljko Ranogajec, a wealthy Australian and famed professional gambler who also goes by John Wilson. The role in the buy of Mr. Marantelli and Mr. Ranogajec were also reported by The Wall Street Journal.
But scooping up nearly 26 million number combinations could not have been accomplished without help from officials.
With a surge of ticket sales in mind, the lottery commission expedited the delivery of around 30 additional terminals to a group of lottery couriers. Half went to two locations connected to Lottery.com, whose former president had been ousted months earlier over improper ticket sales.
The job of getting all those terminals to rapidly print millions of tickets initially fell to Brandon Marsh, the head of product for Lottery.com at the time. Then, a day after he got the assignment, Mr. Marsh said he was told not to worry, the ticket buyer would provide a system to generate and enter the combinations, and the staff members, some from overseas, to print and organize the tickets.
When no one claimed the draw on April 19, 2023, they launched, with three days to pull it off before the next draw.
“It was a crazy 72 hours,” Mr. Potts, the Lottery.com executive, wrote in an email a day after the winning draw.
“I can only imagine the atmosphere was electrifying,” another company leader responded.
The company appeared to make about $260,000 for its part in the deal.
After finding the winning ticket, a group involved in the buy, including people from White Swan Data and Lottery.com, celebrated with cigars and drinks at an Austin bar called Swan Dive — just a few blocks from the Texas Capitol.
It worked so well that a few days later, Mr. Potts said Lottery.com was asked if they could help pull off a similar buy in Tennessee, according to a recording of a company discussion reviewed by The Times.
But the company had to decline, Mr. Potts said. Lottery.com didn’t operate in Tennessee, and officials in that state “wouldn’t just drop off machines.”
Glenn Gelband, a lawyer representing Rook TX, Mr. Marantelli and Mr. Ranogajec, said “all applicable laws, rules and regulations were followed.”
How the caper came to light
For nearly two years, John Brier, a Tampa, Fla., businessman, had been talking to anyone who would listen about the 2023 Texas lottery win and its connection to Lottery.com, which had purchased Mr. Brier’s lottery-data business and, he said, refused to fully pay for it.
He had sued the company a few weeks before the Texas draw. Soon after, he said, a man in Malta with ties to Lottery.com called to help settle the case. But as they talked in the fall of 2023, the man, Ade Repcenko, casually mentioned the company’s ties to what had taken place in Texas.
“That’s when I started digging into it,” Mr. Brier said.
Mr. Repcenko had connections to Colossus Bets and had approached Lottery.com about the bulk purchase in Texas, according to a deposition in one of the legal cases.
In an email, Mr. Repcenko said, “My role was strictly limited to facilitating an introduction between the eventual purchaser and representatives of Lottery.com.”
Spokesmen for Colossus Bets and White Swan Data did not respond to requests for comment.
Soon, Mr. Brier was also talking to others who believed they had been wronged by Lottery.com, including Sharon McTurk, who, Mr. Brier discovered, had the cellphone of a dead man who had been texting regularly with Lottery.com executives.
“It connected everything,” Mr. Brier said of the phone.
‘You’re going to make so much money.’
A few years ago, Ms. McTurk, the owner of a logistics company in Boca Raton, Fla., met a smooth-talking man named Ronald Farah, who was helping Lottery.com raise money. Mr. Farah, a convicted marijuana smuggler whose life sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama, told her he had a can’t-fail opportunity and won her trust.
“You’re going to make so much money,” he promised. She lent the company nearly $2 million.
Then, two years ago, he sent her a video to show that the struggling Lottery.com was getting back on its feet. The video panned a nondescript office space with lots of lottery terminals on desks spitting out tickets.
It was a brief window into the three-day ticket-printing rush in April 2023.
A few months later, Mr. Farah died of a heart attack, and Ms. McTurk — who wanted her money back — persuaded his family to give her the cellphone. On it was the video and thousands of text messages.
In January, a letter was delivered to top Texas officials — signed by Mr. Brier, Ms. McTurk, Mr. Marsh and many others — documenting what they said were potential legal violations surrounding the 2023 draw.
The video offered evidence, Mr. Brier said, of what appeared to be cellphones positioned near each terminal. Texas law prohibits the connecting of devices to lottery terminals, even wirelessly, without the lottery commission’s permission.
A spokesman for the commission declined to comment, citing the state investigations. Mr. Potts, speaking for Lottery.com at the State Senate hearing, denied wrongdoing and accused Mr. Brier of being part of “an organized conspiracy” to attack the company.
Even with the negative publicity, interest apparently remains in bulk-buying lottery tickets in Texas.
The new director of the lottery commission, Ryan Mindell, testified at the hearing that the same people who rigged the April 2023 draw had tried to do it again in December.
This time, he said, they were stopped by the commission.
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
J. David Goodman is the Houston bureau chief for The Times, reporting on Texas and Oklahoma.
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