This was an interesting read, but I wound up with a bad taste in the end.
The thing that stood out to me was that they believed they were actually helping the lottery by buying more tickets. The theory being that some percentage of each ticket goes to the state. But then they only bought tickets when they could profit, so the states lost money to these group sales overall. In reality their scheme contributed nothing, effectively taking profits away from the state. Keep in mind the scale here - they profited $8M with virtually no risk. That money should have gone to schools. Then these people got upset when the games were shut down, I find that incredible and arrogant.
There is also some validity to the statement that they hurt the small time players, if anything by blocking access to several machines and eventually getting the game shut down. They also broke several rules and engaged in dubious ethics by printing their own tickets and buying tickets outside of normal business hours.
After all this, it's amazing how the article ended portraying them in such a positive light.
The lottery officials still take the most blame for being complicit in the scheme. They probably had financial incentives linked to the games gross revenues rather than the net profit. They failed when they designed a game that could be beat, and failed even more by refusing to fix it.
Woops posted before I put a response.
Yes, they were not actually helping the fund. Sadly, the money rarely actually goes to school funding (as in increases school funding), so it probably didn't hurt the schools, but it did take something away from another government program. If I was doing it, I probably would have been upset too, I don't really find that incredible or arrogant.
The whole winfall setup was implemented (intentionally or not) to lose money. I'm pretty surprised no one on the government side did the analysis. Or maybe they did do it, and decided it was acceptable. It could be intentional and have a psychological reason. If you won during the winfall, you would probably be more likely to play at other times.
I think they should be portrayed in positive light. They did the analysis and put in the work. Like someone said, their rates per hour probably weren't that great. They enjoyed it though, they enjoyed finding and "exploiting" the bug. They also shared the wealth, by helping a bunch of others.