5 Criminal Masterminds Who Used Their Powers For Good

3The Statistician Who Can Win The Scratch-Off Lottery Any Time He Likes

Canadian Mohan Srivastava is a geological statistician, which might be the most boring combination of words we've ever typed. But don't tune out just yet, or you'll miss the story of how he gamed the state lottery. Srivastava's fateful moment came when a buddy gave him some scratch-off lottery tickets as a joke. One of them was a tic-tac-toe game, which earned the mathematician three whole Canadian dollars (that's -1.25, in American dollars). Which got him thinking.

Srivastava figured that the lottery had to control the amount of winning tickets to turn a profit, which meant that the algorithm making tic-tac-toe couldn't be totally random, and instead worked on a pattern. With that in mind, he used the info on unscratched cards to figure out if they had winning games hidden underneath. He achieved a whopping 90 percent success rate. He then asked friends to send him scratchcards from all over North America, and found that he could crack about every tic-tac-toe game on the continent. He also discovered that most retailers were totally cool with him buying tickets in bulk and later returning the unscratched ones. Basically, he found a way to make unlimited dollars.

But Srivastava was one of those rare statisticians with a soul. Swiping winners meant he'd lower the chances for anyone else (and those were already terrible to begin with). So instead of becoming a millionaire three Canadian dollars at a time, he decided to inform the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation about the flaw in the system so no one else could ever exploit it. At first they ignored Srivastava, but that stopped when he sent them 20 untouched cards, sorted into winners and losers, and told them to scratch and see for themselves. Being a geological statistician must pay very, very well.

2The Conman Who Will Teach You How To Avoid Getting Scammed

Paul Wilson learned the ways of hustling at an early age, when his grandpa taught him how to cheat at gin. That sounds like a pretty rad grandpa ... who had no idea what he'd unleashed. For much of the '90s, Wilson hit casinos hard -- counting cards, shuffle tracking, and all of those other very legal methods that will get you blackballed from any reputable gambling den in the world. He never got caught, so in the year 2000, he decided to turn the tables and started teaching casinos how to avoid getting ripped off by people like ... well, himself.

Wilson has given lectures on how to avoid scams, not just to regular schmoes, but also to big corporations, banking groups, and even institutions like MasterCard. But his greatest scamanitarian work came in 2002, when he made the long-running BBC TV show The Real Hustle. In it, he and some co-hosts deconstructed con jobs like turncoat magicians, and explored how hustlers exploit our blind spots -- like how quickly we'll give personal information to anyone with a clipboard, or how we throw our car keys at anyone wearing a fluorescent jacket within a mile of a parking service.

1The Guys Who Will Hack Your Car To Make It Safer

In the digital age, anything can be hacked. Computers, phones, TVs ... even the little screen on your microwave isn't safe from malicious cup noodle hackers. But it's hard to do real damage by, say, hacking into someone's smart toaster. Not so with smart cars, where a hacker could potentially take the wheel and send you hurtling at 100 mph toward certain doom. But if your car is hacked by Chris Valasek or Charlie Miller, they'll only blast the radio, pull you over, and lecture you about how unreliable the auto industry is.