Summary: After the largest inside lottery-fix in the country, the first lawsuit emerges in Iowa.
For “Lucky” Larry Dawson winning the Iowa lottery should have been a dream come true. In 2011, he claimed a $9 million jackpot, but this year, he’s out for more.
Dawson is the first plaintiff in litigation following an insider lottery-rigging scandal. ABC News reports that a Des Moines law firm filed his suit on Wednesday, claiming that Dawson’s May 2011 wining should actually be three times as big. They say if the previous lotto was not rigged, Dawson would have won a total of $25.5 million.
In 2011, Larry Dawson accepted his lottery prize from Terry Rich.
The rigging scandal emerged when Eddie Tipton, the former security director of the Multi-State Lottery Association, was convicted of fixing a $16.5 million jackpot in December 2010. He was caught tempering with a random number generator that draws the winning numbers and purchasing a ticket with those numbers. He was never able to collect the prize because the lawyers who tried to collect it on his behalf were denied after they refused to say who they were working for. The money was returned to the 16 states that participated in Hot Lotto. Years later, Tipton was charged and fired when he was identified on gas station surveillance footage as the person buying the winning ticket.
The video surveillance that caught Tipton buying a lottery ticket for a game he rigged. Photo courtesy of Youtube.
In addition to the Iowa conviction, Tipton is awaiting trials for similar charges in Colorado, Wisconsin, Kansas, and Oklahoma.
After Tipton won the Hot Lotto prize of $16.5 million, the lottery reset to $1 million and then rose to $9 million until Dawson won. In Dawson’s lawsuit, he wants to be declared the winner of the $16.5 million prize in addition to what he won.
“He needs to be made whole,” Dawson’s lawyer Jerry Crawford said.
The Multi-State Lottery Association runs Powerball and 37 other state and territory lotteries.
The organization was named a defendant as well as the Iowa Lottery, who vows to fight Dawson’s claim. They say he was paid the money that he was entitled to.
“It is impossible to rewrite history. No one can know what would have occurred in this case had any event in it been changed,” Terry Rich, CEO of the Iowa Lottery, said.
Dawson’s lawsuit also alleges that the random number generators that Tipton built lacked fraud prevention tools that other models had. The draw room’s surveillance camera system also repeatedly malfunctioned.
Dawson’s second attorney, Nicolas Mauro, said it was alarming that the lax security at the lottery wasn’t able to catch Tipton but a gas station’s system could.
Tipton’s attorney, Dean Stowers, blames the Iowa lottery for Dawson’s lawsuit. He essentially says that if they were not so zealous in pursuing Tipton without enough evidence then the integrity of the games would not be put into question.
Source: ABC News