Hot Lotto

Hot Lotto gave smaller lotteries the opportunity to create the "middle-sized" jackpots that are commonplace in single-state games in populous states such as in California, New York, and Florida.

Hot Lotto drawings were held Wednesday and Saturday at MUSL's headquarters in West Des Moines, Iowa.

In 2017, it was announced that Hot Lotto would be discontinued due to falling sales and a 2010 fraud scandal first uncovered in 2015; its final drawing was on October 28, 2017.

Hot Lotto had an option called Sizzler where players could pay an additional dollar to win triple the normal amount of a non-jackpot prize.

A jackpot winner received cash (although not necessarily in one payment); however, the "pre-withholding" amount must be declared for income tax purposes.

On July 20, 2015, Eddie Raymond Tipton, MUSL's director of information security, was found guilty of two counts of fraud for rigging a Hot Lotto drawing in December 2010, and then fraudulently attempting to claim the prize anonymously.

[4][5][6][7] Prosecutors believed that Tipton had used his privileged access to the secured room housing the Hot Lotto computer for servicing, in order to install a rootkit that rigged the $16.5 million drawing held on December 29, 2010.