DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) – A former lottery computer technician convicted in a scheme to rig computers to win jackpots for himself, friends and family has been paroled after serving more than five years in an Iowa prison.
Eddie Tipton, 59, was released from prison Friday, according to online prisoner records. Axios Des Moines first reported that Tipton had been freed from the state prison in Clarinda.
Tipton pleaded guilty to ongoing criminal conduct in 2017 and was ordered to pay restitution of $2.2 million to Colorado, Wisconsin, Kansas and Oklahoma. He shared some of the restitution obligation with his brother in Texas, who collected some of the winnings and served a 75-day jail sentence.
Tipton worked at an Urbandale, Iowa, organization that provided random number drawing computers to several lottery states. At his sentencing hearing, Tipton told the judge he “wrote software that included code that allowed me to understand or technically predict winning numbers, and I gave those numbers to other individuals who then won the lottery and shared the winnings with me.”
It’s not clear what happened to the money Tipton and his associates won between 2005 and 2011. Out of the seven known winning tickets that netted more than $2.2 million, Eddie Tipton claimed to have ended up with only $351,000.