How strict are the controls over state lotteries? Could there be industry insiders who profit from secret information without the average player ever finding out?

Of course, all lottery organisations strongly deny this. They claim that anything like this is impossible.

In a Reddit contribution, one anonymous state lottery employee gave this interesting explanation - straight from the horse's mouth:

  "The lottery industry operates like Las Vegas. In other words, the whole thing is governed by an extreme separation of duties and access controls.

Every lottery has a security division that exists for the sole purpose of catching crooks - both internal and external. It's virtually impossible to "rig" a drawing or generate a winning wager post-draw without collusion on the part of at least five or six people.

And even then, it would take a miracle to get past audits, system checks, etc. I'm not saying that people haven't tried, regardless. I'm not even going to say that it hasn't happened. I will say it's a one-way ticket to federal prison, though."

From this statement it seems that the lottery is fairly well controlled.