The $80 Billion Gamble

The Inside Story of How a Suspicious Ticket, Hot Dogs and Bigfoot Foiled the Biggest Lottery Fraud in U.S. History

By: Perry Beeman, Terry Rich

Narrated by: Terry Rich, Perry Beeman

Length: 5 hrs and 26 mins

Publisher's summary

Eddie Tipton went to prison in 2017 for masterminding the biggest lottery fraud in U.S. history. In a twisting and bizarre tale, he somehow mixed a cocktail of greed, Bigfoot hunting, deception, cybercrime, and a love of hot dogs on his way to a felony conviction after he and several accomplices scored a series of jackpots from rigged drawings but fell short on the biggest "score" of them all. Call it "The $80 Billion Gamble" because the future of the entire lottery industry was at risk if someone didn't solve this case of computer tampering and multimillion-dollar prizes. Tipton's downfall made international news, but this audiobook tells the story of the investigators and public officials who solved the mystery. Veteran journalist Perry Beeman and retired lottery executive Terry Rich use a vivid mixture of recorded phone calls, court documents, personal communications, and the public record to give listeners an exclusive inside view of one of the most surprising and captivating white-collar crimesthe nation has seen. It's a wild story of greed and misplaced confidence, and a study in public officials whose determination survived a nearly cold trail, a team that insisted on being transparent and sticking with the case. As you'll listen in this audiobook, they did - against long odds.

©2019 Rich Keynote L.L.C. (P)2019 Rich Keynote L.L.C.

Interesting facts in dire need of an editor

“The $80 Million Gamble” is infamous in lottery circles, and it is a testament to the fact that no matter the security systems in place, it takes good people to make those systems work.

However, the amount of repetition in the book leads on to ponder whether multiple people edited the chapters separately. Also, the snarky asides set a tone of a tale being told at a dimly lit roadside lounge rather than a serious examination of the complexities of lottery security and the lives on either side of right and wrong.

Interesting subject matter, poorly told story...

This is like listening to your drunk uncle tell a story you're interested in hearing, but he can't stay on topic, keeps going back and telling you things he already told you, gets caught up in the minutiae, and can't just get to the freaking point.

Excellent!

Extremely well researched and presented! Riveting topic in today’s world. A must read for anyone intrigued by digital crime and the integrity of the system!! Congratulations to the authors for a great job, to Iowa law enforcement for not giving up, and to the Iowa Lottery for not giving in to the wrong pressures!

Not ready for publication

In the recording, there are many instances in which the author stumbles over a phrase and repeats it, but the first instance wasn't edited out.

The text needs heavy editing to be ready for book form. The flow is often needlessly interrupted when the authors often cut to poetic asides about greed or money or whatever that have nothing to do with the story. But more importantly, there are major structural issues that more or less remove any sense of suspense of interest in continuing. The book opens with something approximating an inverted pyramid style article about the subject, which summarizes the entire story and spoils the ending. Then it loops around and tells the same story again with the details that probably should have been there the first time. The repetition and asides eventually make it feel like they're just padding it out for length.