Years ago I had a friend who's father made a living smuggling cigarettes (and probably other stuff) from Northern Africa to Gibraltar. He laundered his income by buying winning lottery tickets.
In the book "Ringworld," an excellent work of science fiction that inspired the setting of the Halo franchise, there is a character who was bred for luck (as though it were a genetic trait) via a birthright lottery. The reasoning was that those who won would be luckiest, and she was the descendant of 6 straight generations of birthright lottery winners. The character is impossibly lucky all the time.
Never forget João Alves, the Brazilian politician who had won part of 200 lotteries, because, as he said, "God helped me, and I made money".
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/30/world/new-government-corru...
Clarance Jones http://archive.boston.com/business/articles/2011/11/05/frequ...
TL;DR - Audited by IRS but had 200 boxes of losing tickets & records in storage facilities, which the auditors apparently didn't want to search through. He ended up winning his defense against the state's tax claims as well.
How does he win so much? Is he psychic?
It's too bad the article doesn't go in more depth. There are a few plausible explanations for why people claim an unusually high number of prizes:
1) Someone is buying a huge number of tickets, and just winning proportional to the amount that they spend.
2) Someone is a "10 percenter." They buy winning tickets at a discount to the prize amount, collect losing tickets that they didn't actually buy, and commit blatant tax fraud by claiming "losses" that offset their "winnings."
3) Someone knows which tickets are going to win before buying them.
All three of these stories are interesting, but they're very different. Most coverage seems to assume (2), but stops at "tax agency is incompetent at detecting blatant tax fraud" without exploring why the tax agency is so bad at what they do.
Persistence might be key? Some people may be addicted to gambling with lottery tickets, or may just buy more than others in the same area.
I remember once early in my IT career, I was doing work for the local government agency that was responsible for issuing all the 'scratch the ticket and find 3 matching symbols' lottery games in our state. They used to sell the tickets at the front counter of the agency office as well as various shops and newsagencies around town etc.
While I was working on a PC in the manager's office, another manager came in and said that one of the games had sold ALL tickets at the other retail outlets, and that they had about a hundred $2 tickets left at their front desk and the main prize of $1000 hadn't gone off yet.
When one manager left the room, the other manager looked at me and said "Well, the rules forbid us from buying those tickets, but if you have a spare couple of hundred on you, I'd buy up all those tickets at the front counter...". I thought it was all a bit weird and didn't bite, but I found out later that a friend of someone who worked there bought all the tickets, and sure enough, won the $1000 prize in that particular game. Made me wonder how many 'friends' of people who worked there were in on the old unsold ticket grey marketing?
Also while growing up, there was a family that lived down the road from us who always seemed to win almost every giveaway competition in our town - free TV's, food, whitegoods, airline tickets, you name it. One day I was actually there visiting their son who was about the same age, and I noticed that their mother was entering competitions almost as a full time occupation. She would get various catalogues and our local newspaper and sit down with the kids every afternoon cutting out and sending out coupons, competition entries and sweepstakes all the time - they would have to be sending out at least 20+ per day. Way to stack the odds in their favour.
They eventually left town in the most spectacular fashion - when Michael Jackson did one of his huge tours of Australia, the family won a set of tickets to see him in a sweepstakes, then promptly bought tickets for ALL of his other shows in other states in Australia! This information got leaked to the press, and Jackson found out about it, and ended up inviting this family to Neverland in the US where 2 of the kids ended up staying for years.
You that old saying - you make your own luck. I think this particular family lived it.
This post seems to be a summary of an entire series relating to 'Improbably Frequent Winners'.
The first post of the actual series, which is a lot more in depth, is here: http://www.pennlive.com/watchdog/2017/09/defying_the_odds_pa...
I can't say too much, because they are a current client of mine, but I've been doing work with a wholesaler for one of the biggest lotteries here in my country, and they seem to have a LOT of customers who bulk buy lottery tickets in what seems to be patterns.
I am talking hundreds of thousands of dollars of lottery tickets per week. Their winning are also along those lines. I don't know about the industry, but these sound like professional lottery players who check odds and play the system much as they would the stock market. They probably have set systems in place and complex prediction and statistical algorithms which ensures they win just more than they lose?
I am thinking that 'pro' players such as these might skew the statistic for winners to a large extent?
A possible rationnal explanation :
In France some scratchcard are sold to merchants in packages containing a proportional number of winning cards. For example, on a lot of 100 cards, sixty are null, 20 allows you to earn five euros, 10 allows you to earn ten euros ...
So the cheat is easy for a merchant (or his complices) : he just needs scratching each cards of a packages until find the maximum earnings. The others cards are sold to customers.
http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2008/11/26/01016-200...
sfmbe
I have trouble understanding how winning the lottery this often doesn't immediately raise red flags for fraud. Is there some reason that people might buy winning lottery tickets?
I don't see that anyone has yet referenced this article.
https://www.wired.com/2011/01/ff_lottery/all/1
It explains how to win (an old lotto), and more importantly why there is a way to win.
There is a bigger issue here: Why wasn't such an analysis done 50 years ago? Where is the incentive for people to uncover fraud?
All governments should have a rule that says: if you uncover fraud or waste in a government department you get 5% of the money that taxpayers save.
Maybe their research should have also included a Google search of the statistical unusual winners name in quotes plus the state name plus Lottery winner:
For example, the most winning lottery winner in America was covered by the Boston Globe in 2011: http://archive.boston.com/business/articles/2011/11/05/frequ...
[1] He's been on the radar as a ticket cashier since at least 1999 and has been getting an IRS refund for his gambling losses since 1988.
On other news, most probably Mr. Philip Stark ( a statistician at the University of California, Berkeley):
http://www.pennlive.com/watchdog/2017/09/defying_the_odds_ma...
calculated to be implausible that on Hacker News he would be nominated by someone in a same post with the quote from the Simpsons "Aw, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forfty percent of all people know that.".
Yet it just happened.
I sincerely hope that the states would be willing to look at Oregon and Florida's solutions to the requests. I actually also really like the CD being issued, because it's a physical thing that you could take into court in contrast to a web page (which often isn't quite as useful these days because all of these fancy web apps) and know that it hasn't changed one iota.
It'd be better if it were a usb thumb drive if it's to be a bit more modern.
Maybe a more sophisticated modern numbers game with lottery insiders colluding with 'winners'? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_game
Of course there are ways to beat the lottery. For one, ask the clerk which ticket to buy. They will gladly give you the one most people win from.
Also you can study the patterns. If you buy the same ticket over and over, a streak of losing is a good idea that something big is coming (uneven distribution of the odds). Most people at this point would give up and buy a different ticket, but that's a bad strategy. A streak of winning small amounts is actually bad (proper distribution of the odds). With a little social engineering (small talks with other customers), you can gather that intelligence. Evidence of this effect: the powerball, mega millions, etc. When no one wins they balloon. When someone wins each time, they win relatively small amounts.
Another mistake people make is buying different tickets instead of the same. That's why only a few people win.
So much of lottery is reverse psychology.
it's possible, some people have gotten struck by lighting over a dozen times, which in theory is as likely as winning the Powerball twice. (1 in 12,000 likelyhood of being struck over your lifetime)
Has anyone considered some of these people might be psychic? Professor Daryl Bem's published study "Feeling the Future" comes to mind.
That's funny to see this article. I remember an article about it -- also in CJR -- when the original series broke in 2014 [0]. Looks like this article, which is from today, is about other reporters taking it nationwide. Which is great. One of the more confounding things (to me) about journalism is how a great investigation in one state isn't done in another. Not by the reporting team of the first story, but by any journalist in other states, because it's easy "money", in the sense that you have a framework to copy/imitate, and if there was a corrupt system in one state, there's likely to be something similar in all the other 49 states. And it will still be "news" because of how fundamentally different state laws and bureaucracies are. But then again, sometimes newsrooms have a culture of not wanting to be seen as doing something that has been perceived to have been done, even if it was by a non-competitor (e.g. a non-Florida newspaper, in this case)
Seeing investigative efforts replicated nationwide not only makes for 50 unique-in-their-own way stories, that benefit 50 different jurisdictions. You also get bonus meta-stories about states that are severe outliers, when the 50 are compared and contrasted.
[0] http://archives.cjr.org/united_states_project/palm_beach_pos...