The US lottery industry fears a crisis of consumer confidence as investigations continue into the fraudulent awarding of multiple jackpots in multiple states.

In September, Eddie Ray Tipton was sentenced to 10 years in prison for rigging a Multi State Lottery Association (MUSL) computer to produce a set of pre-programmed winning numbers that resulted in a $14.3m Hot Lotto jackpot in December 2010.

That jackpot went unclaimed for a year, until a New York lawyer walked into the Iowa Lottery office with the ticket two hours before the deadline for claiming the prize. The lawyer said he represented an investment trust, whose members he wouldn’t identify, but the Lottery needs to know who its winners are, so they refused to release the funds. Amazingly, the lawyer then withdrew all claims on the prize, and the millions went back into the lottery prize pool.

Tipton’s co-workers eventually recognized him on the security footage from the gas station at which the ticket was purchased. Prosecutors subsequently charged Tipton with fraud after concluding that Tipton had used his job as MUSL director of information security to surreptitiously install self-deleting malware on the computer in question.