This isn't the first time someone has been able to turn lottery odds in their favor. A woman named Joan Ginther, who has a PhD in Statistics from Stanford, won more than $15 million from a Texas lottery scratch card based game [1]. Though she has never spoken and exactly how she did it remains a mystery, her odds of winning the number of times she did as a random buyer of scratch cards were 1 in 18 septillion and should occur approximately once every quadrillion years. Here's another case, where a geologist named Mohan Srivastava cracked several different lottery scratch ticket games [2]. He warned lottery officials, who did....nothing.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kiriblakeley/2011/07/21/meet-the...
[2] http://www.wired.com/2011/01/ff_lottery/