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When a Currency Conversion Bug Inflated Lottery Prizes by 10x - And Top Executive Paid the Price
A simple mix-up in exchange rate direction caused thousands of lottery winners to receive vastly inflated prize notifications — triggering a major scandal and the CEO’s resignation. Here’s how a small bug turned into a multi-million dollar mistake
As media reports, a developer recently made a serious mistake. Instead of dividing a value by 100, he multiplied it. This error led to the resignation of a CEO and caused a loss of approximately 700 million USD.
But let’s start from the beginning. In Europe, there is a popular lottery game called Euro Jackpot. The rules are simple: you choose five numbers from 1 to 50 and 2 Euro Numbers (from 1 to 12). If you guess all of them correctly, you win the Tier 1 prize, which ranges from around 10 to 120 million euros.
Hi! My name is Tom Smykowski, and I’m a professional software engineer
The odds of winning the top prize are about 1 in 140 million. To put that into perspective, you have twice the chance of being killed by an asteroid. Yet, this doesn’t stop people from becoming addicted and losing a lot of…
