Cracking the Lotto Code

How to win the lottery, all the time!

Earlier this evening, I was excited to sit down and watch Jon Stewart’s take on Trump and Musk teaming up when I was greeted with a familiar sight:

Darn you, YouTube! You’ve won the battle, but not the war.

Every so often, the crack team at YouTube catches up to my AdBlocker. As a result, I have to tolerate commercials for a few days while the AdBlocker publishers catch back up.¹

Each time, I am reminded of how bad YouTube ads have gotten.

Gone are the days of movie trailers or mediocre indie rappers trying to get their face out there. Even the Vrbo spots have disappeared. Instead, we are greeted with a deluge of scam artists selling garbage-tier courses on everything from dropshipping to selling plagiarized audiobooks.²

Today, I saw a new version of an age-old scam, one that was so nonsensical that I watched the 2 minute ad, continued to the low-effort website, and watched the whole video there, as well.

You see, for only $197, they’re going to teach me how to make $22,000 a month off the lottery! A mathematician figured it out - since humans made the lottery, it’s not truly random. There’s a way to pick the right numbers all the time.

Unfortunately, there was nowhere to input my credit card info and complete the purchase. Guess I can’t quit my job after all.

I invite you to check out the video on this sketchy website.³ Take note of:

• Convenience store owners apparently being on the hook for lottery winnings.

• The promise of wealth - not getting rich quick, but slow accumulation of money via the infamously predictable lottery thanks to this one weird trick.

• The collection of sweaty old white guys awkwardly reading off their scripts.

• A magical software that gives you high probability “special numbers”.

• Repeated assurance that this is “legal, ethical, and NOT cheating”.

Don’t bother watching more than 10 minutes, it just starts repeating itself.⁴ Too bad I couldn’t try out the Lottery Defeater Software. It seemed foolproof!

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In all seriousness, this post became an unexpected sequel to yesterday’s discussion surrounding how we’ll believe the things that we want to see.

When I Googled “Lottery Defeater Software”, I found full pages of AI-generated positive reviews and videos on reputable websites like Medium and YouTube, all describing the dubious product:

The video on that website made its two targets abundantly clear:

1. Degenerate gamblers who are looking for an edge in a random game.

2. People who desperately need to relieve some of the pressures on their families. The kinds of people who can’t see a way out without a miracle.

This is the kind of garbage that YouTube is platforming through ads. They’re profiting off of douchebags⁵ who fund their marketing by preying on some of society’s most vulnerable.

1. The arms race between YouTube and the various hackers improving our lives is worth checking out, but I won’t cover it here.

2. One of my favorite content creators, Münecat, made a lovely video detailing some of these course scams. There’s plenty of info out there in general, though - some YouTubers entire channels are built around “debunking” scams they’ve seen.

3. I can verify that no viruses have been downloaded to my Mac. Yet.

4. The slider on the bottom is extremely deceptive, and the full video is over 40 minutes.

5. To the man pretending to be Kenneth Leffer, Genius Statistician and Lottery Wizard, fuck you. I hope that you get mugged by one of the people you ripped off.