If you buy a ticket to the lottery or hear about those big jackpots— do you ever wonder whether, secretly, the fix is in? There’s a scandal still unfolding in Texas that implies you could be right to ask the question. 

It started in April 2023 when, after months with no winner, the Lotto Texas jackpot climbed to its third largest in history: $95 million. When the rubber balls came up with the six winning numbers – one ticket matched. The winner took the lump-sum-check option and collected about $57.8 million.

Almost immediately, Texas Lotto watcher Dawn Nettles became suspicious. She publishes the online Lotto Report in Texas.

“I even posted on my website that the jackpot would be won Saturday night. Or I felt like it most likely would be won on Saturday night,” she told Full Measure. “And that was because Texans weren't spending – I think total sales for that particular draw was $28 million. No, that's out of the ordinary.”

Lotto Texas is a simple six-number game. There are about 25.8 million possible combinations. With the jackpot at $95 million, someone with enough money could buy every combination – and still walk away with tens of millions of dollars.

Buying up all the combinations wasn’t technically against Texas law. But the law required buyers to purchase tickets in person at a licensed shop – not by phone or mail. That is, until a new kind of middleman appeared.

One of them is “Lottery Now,” which owns and operates the Mido Lotto app and website. It allows distant customers to order tickets on the web or phone app. The middlemen would get the paper tickets printed.

Former Texas Lottery official Rob Kohler says the system was designed to prevent that sort of purchasing.

“The lottery was always a face-to-face transaction,” he says. “You walk in a corner store, you know, the clerk's looking at you. And the Texas Lottery changed rules that enabled these companies to operate in our states selling tickets over mobile phones without being in violation of the rules.”

He says the Texas lottery changed those rules very quietly. Those changes helped open the door for the winners of the April 2023 jackpot: a foreign syndicate, including a professional gambler from Australia known as “The Joker.” 

But first, the syndicate had to find a way to get tens-of-millions of tickets printed in three days. That’s when the Texas Lottery Commission sprung into action. It approved and delivered dozens of extra terminals and paper to multiple sites to print the syndicate’s tickets.

“From a Wednesday to a Saturday draw, there's only 72 hours between the draws," Nettles explained. "And so they had to make sure that they could print 24, 25 million combinations in that 72-hour period. And so that was the criteria for it. They used iPads and telephones too, and QR codes.”

The gambling syndicate generated and loaded millions of combinations on private phones and tablets as QR codes. Workers fed the codes into the official terminals at high speed. The terminals spit out tickets around the clock.

“The administration of the Texas Lottery knew that they were working with people that were gonna buy every combination, they were still telling the people of the state, 'Come spend your money.' You know, 'Come win this 95 million dollar jackpot' when they knew it was impossible for a Texan," Kohler also said.

And, you know, Eden, Texas, where I'm from, you know, they’re gonna go spend a dollar and see if they can win. It was impossible for them to win the full amount, advertised amount. Because on the side, they were letting these characters buy every combination."

Lottery Now, which printed and sold about 11 million of the tickets at its Hooked on Montana storefront, earned about $600,000 in commission. Three other stores responsible for printing millions more of the syndicate’s tickets got more than $700,000.

The former executive director of the Texas Lottery, Gary Grief, is charged with abuse of official capacity. He declined our interview request. His attorney told us, “There is no allegation that Gary Grief obtained personal benefit or payments in any form the lottery ticket purchases. The case will be challenged legally and factually in the coming months.”

Meantime, lawmakers in Austin decided to shut down the Texas Lottery Commission. It’s now being run under another agency: the Department of Licensing and Regulation.

For more on this story, watch "Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson” Sunday. Attkisson's most recent bestseller is "Follow the $cience: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails."