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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 i

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.

jonas21 9y ago
They link to the actual article: http://www.pennlive.com/watchdog/2017/09/defying_the_odds_part_1.html http://www.pennlive.com/watchdog/2017/09/defying_the_odds_pa... It covers some of the explanations for why some people claim so many prizes: > Based on legal proceedings, lottery investigations and confessions from some frequent winners, the following techniques - or a combination of them - have generally explained how some players have defied the odds: > 1. "Theft": As in Ontario, investigators have repeatedly caught store clerks or owners stealing winning lottery tickets from prize claimants and claiming them for themselves. To allay suspicion, some have used friends or family members to cash stolen tickets on their behalf. > 2. Cheating: It's difficult to cheat the lottery, but some players have been caught "micro-scratching," a practice where a person, typically a store clerk or owner, scratches a tiny portion of an unsold scratch ticket to see if it's a winner and then claims it. > 3. "Ticket cashing" or "discounting": A practice where a person cashes in a winning ticket on someone else's behalf. Often the seller is trying to avoid having debts, like overdue child support payments, from being deducted from their winnings. Typically the winner sells their ticket to the buyer at less than its value - a "discount" - which allows the buyer to make a small profit. In some states, like Virginia, this practice is illegal. In other states, like Pennsylvania, it isn't. > 4. Money laundering: Some states have caught criminals buying winning lottery tickets from players and then cashing them for themselves. By doing so, they effectively turn "dirty money," like drug profits, into "clean money." In a well-known case, the "Black Mafia Family" purchased more than $1 million in winning Michigan lottery tickets between 1990 and 2005.
Nition 9y ago
Well, they did basically rule out #1 for the top guy, where they say even spending $300 million on tickets would still only give him a 1 in 10 million change of winning so much.
curun1r 9y ago
Since the top claimant was someone from Massachusetts, I wonder if this [1] has anything to do with it. Perhaps he's the person who cashes in tickets for one of the syndicates mentioned in the story. As an aside, the guy mentioned at the top of the story is named James Harvey and your username is jmharvey...any chance you're him or did we just hit an "improbable" coincidence :-) [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/how-mit-students-gamed-the-lottery/470349/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/how-mit...
- jmharvey 9y ago
  As far as I know, all of those syndicates are out of business after the lottery retired the Cash Winfall game. (And yup, that's me. I could probably make my HN bio a little more explicit on this point.)
grkvlt 9y ago
Surely 1a) Someone is buying a nominal amount of tickets and actually is lucky, is also an option? Yes, statistics says that on average they must spend >> some amount to have some chance of winning, there is still the fact that no matter how small the probability of winning, someone still wins...

jonas21 9y ago

They link to the actual article: http://www.pennlive.com/watchdog/2017/09/defying_the_odds_part_1.html http://www.pennlive.com/watchdog/2017/09/defying_the_odds_pa... It covers some of the explanations for why some people claim so many prizes: > Based on legal proceedings, lottery investigations and confessions from some frequent winners, the following techniques - or a combination of them - have generally explained how some players have defied the odds: > 1. "Theft": As in Ontario, investigators have repeatedly caught store clerks or owners stealing winning lottery tickets from prize claimants and claiming them for themselves. To allay suspicion, some have used friends or family members to cash stolen tickets on their behalf. > 2. Cheating: It's difficult to cheat the lottery, but some players have been caught "micro-scratching," a practice where a person, typically a store clerk or owner, scratches a tiny portion of an unsold scratch ticket to see if it's a winner and then claims it. > 3. "Ticket cashing" or "discounting": A practice where a person cashes in a winning ticket on someone else's behalf. Often the seller is trying to avoid having debts, like overdue child support payments, from being deducted from their winnings. Typically the winner sells their ticket to the buyer at less than its value - a "discount" - which allows the buyer to make a small profit. In some states, like Virginia, this practice is illegal. In other states, like Pennsylvania, it isn't. > 4. Money laundering: Some states have caught criminals buying winning lottery tickets from players and then cashing them for themselves. By doing so, they effectively turn "dirty money," like drug profits, into "clean money." In a well-known case, the "Black Mafia Family" purchased more than $1 million in winning Michigan lottery tickets between 1990 and 2005.

Nition 9y ago

Well, they did basically rule out #1 for the top guy, where they say even spending $300 million on tickets would still only give him a 1 in 10 million change of winning so much.

curun1r 9y ago

Since the top claimant was someone from Massachusetts, I wonder if this [1] has anything to do with it. Perhaps he's the person who cashes in tickets for one of the syndicates mentioned in the story. As an aside, the guy mentioned at the top of the story is named James Harvey and your username is jmharvey...any chance you're him or did we just hit an "improbable" coincidence :-) [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/how-mit-students-gamed-the-lottery/470349/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/how-mit...

jmharvey 9y ago
As far as I know, all of those syndicates are out of business after the lottery retired the Cash Winfall game. (And yup, that's me. I could probably make my HN bio a little more explicit on this point.)

grkvlt 9y ago

Surely 1a) Someone is buying a nominal amount of tickets and actually is lucky, is also an option? Yes, statistics says that on average they must spend >> some amount to have some chance of winning, there is still the fact that no matter how small the probability of winning, someone still wins...