Eddie Tipton
Appearances
Criminal
Hot Lotto
Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
Rob Sand argued that the jury didn't need to understand how Eddie had chosen the winning numbers.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
They just needed to recognize the incredible coincidence of the head of IT security for the Multi-State Lottery Association picking the winning numbers, with the odds at more than 10 million to one, and that a man who had access to everything involved in picking the numbers just happened to get the right ones. He wrote the code that produced the winning numbers.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
He had direct contact with the random number-generating machines. He had to have tampered with the process somehow and tried to get around lottery rules when he wanted to claim the prize.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
Eddie Tipton was found guilty of both counts of fraud, one for attempting to fraudulently claim a winning lottery ticket, and the other for manipulating lottery equipment in order to ensure his win.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
Rob Sand tried again to offer Eddie Tipton a deal, this time a reduced sentence, if he would explain how he'd pulled it off. Again, Eddie refused to tell how he'd done it, or even admit that he'd rigged the system at all. Rob Sand thought it was interesting that even after he'd already been found guilty, Eddie Tipton wouldn't go for a reduced sentence. And then he got a phone call.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
Eddie Tipton was convicted of two counts of felony fraud in 2015 and sentenced to 10 years in prison. His Multistate Lottery Association co-worker, an old friend, Ed Stephon, says he couldn't believe it. They'd known each other for 30 years. They'd met in a calculus class at the University of Houston and had stayed close. Eddie was in Ed's wedding.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
On December 23, 2010, a $16.5 million hot lotto ticket was sold at a quick-trip gas station on the northeast side of Des Moines, Iowa. The buyer of the ticket had matched all five numbers, plus the hot lotto number. The ticket read 3-12-16-26-33 and hot ball 11. The news made local headlines all throughout the state after the numbers were drawn six days later.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
And in the early 2000s, when Ed needed to hire someone to run the IT department at the Multi-State Lottery Association, he recommended Eddie for the job. So you're the guy who got him hired? I am. Did anything in him lead you to believe that this was an inside job, that he might be involved?
Criminal
Hot Lotto
Had you noticed over the years that Eddie seemed to have a lifestyle, things, cars, homes that didn't really match up with the salary that you knew he was making? No.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
Assistant Attorney General Rob Sand was asking the same question. When he learned that Eddie Tipton's brother, Tommy Tipton, had won the lottery in Colorado back in 2005, he started making calls. and learned that Tommy Tipton had been investigated by a Texas FBI agent named Richard Renneson.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
And Richard Renneson told Rob Sand that after he'd won the lottery, Tommy Tipton went to a fireworks dealer and tried to launder $500,000.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
The fireworks dealer went to the FBI, and the FBI questioned Tommy. He told Agent Renneson that he was laundering the money because he didn't want his wife to know he'd won it. He said he'd even gone so far as to ask a friend to claim the prize on his behalf. It was all a little strange, but it was all legal.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
Still, Robsand wondered why Eddie's brother had behaved so strangely, and why Eddie still wouldn't tell him how he'd managed to get the winning numbers in Iowa. Plus, two winners in the same family was just too much. He thought it was suspicious enough to make calls to all the other state lotteries in the country.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
They started looking at a list of names of winners, searching for connections to the Tipton brothers. And they learned that in 2007, a winning lottery ticket had been purchased in Wisconsin by a man named Robert Rhodes, a name they knew from Eddie Tipton's LinkedIn. He'd been the link between Philip Johnston and Eddie Tipton. Robert Rhodes' winning ticket numbers were drawn on December 29, 2007.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
Eddie Tipton's winning ticket numbers were drawn on December 29, 2010. And then Rob Sand discovered an Oklahoma lottery winner named Kyle Kahn.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
Kyle Kahn's winning ticket numbers were drawn November 23, 2011. Tommy Tipton's winning numbers in Colorado were drawn on November 23, 2005. Rob Sand also discovered two jackpots in Kansas that had been won on the same day and same year as Eddie Tipton's Iowa ticket. The people who claimed those prizes were both contacts in Eddie's phone.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
But it wasn't until January of 2016 that Rob Sand actually figured out what Eddie Tipton was doing.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
The Muscatine Journal's headline read, Someone is suddenly a millionaire. But then, no one showed up with the winning ticket.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
Eddie had written a code that would dramatically decrease the number of possible winning combinations to a smaller set of numbers that Eddie could go play. He designed his code to work within specific, narrow circumstances. Wednesdays or Saturday evenings, only three days of the year, May 27th, November 23rd, and December 29th, butting right up against Memorial Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
Very convenient times for Eddie Tipton to be out of the office, buying lottery tickets. Rob Sand and investigators presented Eddie Tipton with the new evidence against him, including the fact that Robert Rhodes was now working as a witness for the prosecution. They asked him once again to tell them how he did it. And this time, he agreed.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
In the end, Eddie Tipton, along with his brother Tommy, admitted to defrauding states out of more than $24 million.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
Rob Sand has called them crimes against gratitude. Eddie Tipton was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Tommy Tipton went to prison for 75 days. What about all the other guys that were involved in this? Crawford Shaw, Philip Johnston. What happened to them?
Criminal
Hot Lotto
Tommy and Eddie Tipton, there was a lot of money that these guys, that Eddie Tipton won for himself. What happened to all the money?
Criminal
Hot Lotto
Well, you've got me thinking about the lottery again. Maybe I'll just, for the hell of it, stop and get myself a ticket and think maybe I'm lucky. Since we first released this episode in 2021, Eddie Tipton was released from Clorinda Correctional Facility in Iowa on parole. He served five years of his 25-year sentence.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
According to the Iowa court's website, as of today, Eddie and Tommy Tipton have repaid less than $20,000 of the more than $2 million that they owe in restitution. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter. We hope you'll join our new membership program, Criminal Plus. Once you sign up, you can listen to Criminal episodes without any ads.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
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Criminal
Hot Lotto
His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Very soon, I get to do my favorite thing. Go on tour and meet so many of you.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
Someone called in to say that his friend, who was a religious hot lotto player, had just died in a car accident. He asked whether he should go to the junkyard to look through the wrecked car. But each time someone called in, the lottery officials would ask for the 15-digit serial number on the back of the ticket. And each time, those numbers didn't match the winning ticket.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
By early November, almost 11 months had passed with no winner. The ticket was only valid through the end of December. Mary Neubauer, who works for Iowa's lottery, said, I was convinced it would never be claimed. And then she answered a call that came into the lottery office. It was from a man named Philip Johnston, and he had the correct 15-digit serial number.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
About a month later, the man called a second time. This time he told Mary that he had, quote, fibbed the first time. He said he was actually a lawyer calling to help his client claim the ticket, but he couldn't disclose the name of his client. He proposed various ways his client could receive the money, but Mary told him that according to Iowa lottery rules, a winner has to identify themselves.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
Philip Johnston stopped calling after that. And then on the day the ticket was set to expire, about two hours before the end of the claim period, two attorneys showed up in person at the Iowa Lottery office with the actual winning ticket in hand. They said the ticket belonged to their client, a man in New York named Crawford Shaw.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
Crawford Shaw requested that the money be paid to Hexham Investments, a trust in Belize.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
This month, Criminal is coming to Austin, Tucson, Boulder, Portland, Oregon, Detroit, Madison, Northampton, and Atlanta. If you didn't get to come and see our 10-year anniversary show earlier this year, this is your last chance. You'll get to hear seven brand new stories, most of which will probably make you laugh. I'll even try to come and say hi at the merch table.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
The mystery of the unclaimed $16.5 million hot lotto ticket remained unsolved for more than two years. The Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation had looked into it. The Attorney General's Office had looked into it. But no one had made much progress. And then in 2014, Rob Sand, who was working as the Assistant Attorney General in Iowa, was handed the case file. Happy birthday, his boss said.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
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Criminal
Hot Lotto
It wasn't even clear that a crime had been committed. Rob didn't know how to move forward. But included in the case materials, he found a DVD, the security video from 2010. He watched it over and over. There are two camera angles. One taken at some distance from the register. You can't make out the person's face at all from this angle. Just what he's wearing. Jeans and a leather jacket.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
And his build. The way he moves. The second angle is closer, shot from above and behind the register. The man has what looks like a sweatshirt hood pulled up over his head and a baseball cap underneath it. He's looking down most of the time, even when he hands the clerk the money. So no matter how many times Rob Sand watched the video, he just couldn't see much.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
The video had been kept from the public, but Rob Sand started to think that maybe someone out there wouldn't need to see the man's face to know who he was.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
They put out a news release, and news stations broadcast the video across the country.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
This is Ed Steffen. He spent years working at the Multistate Lottery Association. It's called MUSL for short. And when he heard the voice in the video, he knew exactly who it was. Eddie Tipton, his colleague and the head of IT security for the Multistate Lottery Association. Ed Steffen wasn't the only person who recognized Eddie Tipton on the video clip.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
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Criminal
Hot Lotto
Another colleague at the lottery, who was a good friend of Eddie Tipton's, also saw the video and recognized Eddie's voice. But he thought it couldn't possibly be his friend. There had to be something wrong. So he did a little of his own investigating. He used audio software to remove the white noise from the video file.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
He visited the Quick Trip where the ticket was purchased to measure the height of the shelves and the width of the floor tiles. And then he did some sort of analysis to try to show, for example, that the feet of the man in the video were too big or small to be Eddie's, that the man in the video was taller or shorter than his friend.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
He later said, when the FBI guys came in, I wanted to be able to tell them it wasn't Eddie. Once I did this, it was like, well, it is Eddie. Six days after the video was made public, the Department of Criminal Investigation received a tip that the purchaser was Eddie Tipton.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
Investigators visited Eddie Tipton at his office at the Multi-State Lottery Association, where he told them that on the date the lottery ticket was purchased, he wasn't even in the state of Iowa. He said he'd been visiting family in Texas. They subpoenaed his phone records and bank statements, which showed that his story was not quite true.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
He'd been in Des Moines at the time the ticket was purchased. They also looked at Eddie's LinkedIn profile and saw a familiar name. He'd been endorsed by a man named Robert Rhodes. Investigators had heard this name before from Philip Johnston, the man who claimed to represent the winning ticket holder back in 2011. Eddie Tipton was arrested and charged with two felony counts of fraud.
Criminal
Hot Lotto
Multistate Lottery Association employees are ineligible to play the lottery. And not only did Eddie Tipton work for the lottery.