It was Pennsylvania in 1980, and prosecutors were uncovering a lottery scam.

The cheaters included key employees at a Pittsburgh TV station where drawings for Pennsylvania's Pick 3 game were held. A station art director, according to news reports from the time, injected a few grams of white latex paint into balls to be sucked into an air-powered machine.

The cheaters weighed down all balls except those numbered with 4's and 6's, then bought combinations of those numbers. When 6-6-6 hit, they won $1.8 million.

They had also placed bets with illegal bookmakers, who suspected the fix and helped unravel it.

The Pennsylvania scam stands as one of the only known instances of tampering since states began offering lotteries again several decades ago.

In Colonial times, lotteries were marred by scandals that eventually led to their demise.

These days, to prevent fraud, auditors oversee drawings, and all interactions with Powerball drawing machines and balls are tape-recorded.

In 1992, one group found a way around such measures. When a Virginia lottery jackpot topped $27 million, an Australian syndicate tried to buy all 7 million possible combinations.

It ended up with 5 million of them -- and the winner.

Too many winners rouse suspicions

Beepers went off at lottery headquarters across the U.S. in March last year after the winning Powerball numbers were drawn.

A record 110 people had won a second prize worth at least $100,000 for each player.

Typically, only a handful win. So lottery directors were on their phones: Had Powerball been fixed?

One of the first winners showed up the next morning in Tennessee. Lottery director Rebecca Paul and security people were there to greet the woman.

"She ... pulled out a fortune cookie slip," Paul recalled. "She had played the numbers off the cookie slip."

So had 109 others who played the "lucky numbers" on fortunes slipped into thousands of cookies across the country. They came from a New York factory where workers had drawn the numbers from a bowl.

Lucky guy in Iowa really can pick 'em

Most of the time, winners let the computer pick the numbers. But players who do it themselves produce some interesting tales.

In 2003, a Missouri man won using family birthdays.

Last year, an Iowa man chose his own numbers and won $54.8 million in cash before taxes.

How did he pick the winning combination? Eight , he said, is a favorite number; 15 was the number on his brother's dirt-racing motorcycle when they were young; 16 is the date of his wife's birthday; 45 will be his age on his next birthday; 51 was a random choice between 45 and 55, the highest number in Powerball. And 11, he said, the Powerball number, is the date of his oldest son's birthday.