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$560M Powerball Winner Can Keep Her Name Private, Judge Rules
- slovette 9y agoGood. So many of these ‘winners’ lives are ruined almost purely from disclosure.
- SlowBro 9y agoThat was my first thought. Suddenly everyone is knocking on your door and you may even get threats to your life.
- supergarfield 9y agoThis (fairly famous) Reddit post is a really interesting read about this: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/whats_the_happiest_5word_sentence_you_could_hear/chb4v05/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/whats_the...
- internetman55 9y agoSounds like this guy made the mistake in being really rich in a place that isn't "for" rich people. The rapper Lil Boosie has an interview on YouTube where he talks about this. Once you reach a certain level of wealth and status and start to stand out a little too much, you simply can't be around "normal" people without many of them becoming enraged and wanting to hurt, rob, or kill you. You need to go to a rich-people-friendly area (basically some really nice areas of the major metros) or that kind of stuff will just continue.
- John_KZ 9y agoYeah, $264M after taxes. What a disaster. I bet your life would be ruined if you won the lottery.
- m3kw9 9y agoLol, yes don’t underestimate what people expects and want out of you. It’s human nature in pure raw form. You can say no, and they don’t have to take it nicely maybe not even in a perfect world.
- icelancer 9y agoYeah, it probably would be. For many - most, even - their lives become a living hell.
- msie 9y agoWell, both of you are speculating. As some people’s lives are ruined, there are people who won non-anonymously and are doing just fine.
- Bluestrike2 9y agoSure, but the sheer number of horror stories is pretty remarkable. As is the sheer stupidity of how they end. There's also varying degrees of ruined lives. You can avoid kidnapping by some random lunatic, getting killed off by a greedy sibling courtesy with a ridiculously stupid scheme, burying your kid, spiraling into a life of crime, or any of the other examples and still wind up with a life in tatters. Money can distort friendships and families. That's a given. But lottery money? It just seems like a ticket (ha!) to a world-class shit show. People hear the word jackpot, and act as though because you didn't earn the money--after all, it was just a moment of luck--that they're somehow entitled to it as well. Random people coming up to you at a restaurant, or harassing you by phone or knocking on your bloody door? It's the financial equivalent of the full moon. People take it as an excuse to act nuts, and they apparently get very, very angry when lottery winnings aren't shared with them. Winning the lottery and avoiding that kind of nightmarish drama appears to require a constant vigilance for the rest of your life. Let it slip, and you're screwed. If you're lucky, you'll just get peppered with money requests that treat you if you're Santa Clause. Only real. Want to help people? You'll need to sort through the scams and the lies, first; honestly, you'd probably have more of an impact if you just cut annual checks to majority charities instead of trying to directly help people financially yourself. If you're unlucky, you get kidnapped and murdered as part of a harebrained scheme that never had a chance of actually succeeding. Which is just adding insult to injury. There are lottery jackpot winners who avoid these kinds of twisted outcomes. But claiming your prize publicly is a great way to stack the deck against you, all but inviting the worst kind of human behavior to target you for the rest of your life. Ruthlessly maintaining your anonymity doesn't guarantee anything, but it would at least give you a decent start.
- googlryas 9y agoPerhaps, but perhaps it is just because you're almost guaranteed that you are giving basically unlimited money to a previously very poor person who has bad money management skills(the demographic that spends the most money on the lottery).
- DaiPlusPlus 9y agoI know many lotteries issue winnings as annuities (often with a lump-sum alternative, I know). But I’m surprised they don’t switch entirely to annuities simply because it avoids all the bad PR the lottery gets from people who mismanage the money. It’s probably better for the economy too as it’s harder to irresponsibly spend $20k every month for the rest of their lives than a $10m one-off payment: thus maximising utility of money.
- pfarnsworth 9y agoIt's trivial to convert an annuity into a one-time lump sum payment, it's basic finance. Plus they would probably rip off the annuity holder as well by giving a much lower amount.
- protomyth 9y ago"The state had argued that the names of lottery winners must be disclosed to ensure that prizes are distributed fairly and that winners are not related to lottery employees." First, they know who they are writing the check to so the whole "not related to lottery employees" part seems rather bogus. I thought the whole point of disclosure was publicity, but this got plenty and being able to gamble without telling the world you won probably will sell more tickets anyway which is the whole point of the publicity.
- hirsin 9y agoThe point of disclosure isn't to get a first order effect of preventing corruption (I don't know of any sensical mechanism that means publishing a name ensures it's not on a certain list). Obviously the government (should) knows if a winner is related to a government employee, but the only way to enforce that is to allow the public to verify that (or so the argument goes).
- bennyg 9y agoThis seems like a decent application of the Blockchain.
- tylersmith 9y agoThere is no "the Blockchain". Which properties of a blockchain do you think would help with this situation?
- andrestan 9y agoThe magical part where it solves all of our problems with magic.
- currymj 9y agono, finally, for once, this is actually a real application of the blockchain! specifically any that has support for zero-knowledge proofs so that transactions are actually anonymous. you could have a bunch of people buy lottery tickets by sending currency to a smart contract, and then have it transfer the money to a random winner's address, and make the winner's address available only to the holder of the lottery contract's private key.
- jamestimmins 9y agoI'm mostly curious to see what the impact is of this is on future court cases. Presumably in New Hampshire winners won't need to create a trust in order to get the winnings anymore.
- msie 9y agoIs there anything stopping the lottery from creating rules to disqualify anyone who wants to collect anonymously? I feel there are some contracts you shouldn't be able to sue to get out of.
- AckSyn 9y agoFrom the article > The commission already allows winners to sign their tickets with the name of a trust instead of the individual’s name, the judge noted, in essence allowing winners to be anonymous. As a result, he said, the commission’s argument that there is a “strong public interest in disclosing the identity” of the winners “is simply not persuasive.”
- tabeth 9y agoThis is great for the winner, but how would you prevent collusion here? Suppose all winners of every lottery were anonymous -- how would you know the lotteries are even legit? 1. You might argue that auditors and other government officials would enforce integrity. However, it would be trivial to bribe them. In addition, without total transparency you couldn't have confidence in what they're saying, anyway. It's too easy for them to lie. 2. Perhaps the real winners name would be in some book somewhere, e.g. a tax log, but the real name is out of public sight. This would also be easy to rig. If it's anonymous what's stopping the lottery commission and state government from creating a fake winner? 3. Perhaps the biggest argument in favor of a pro-anonymous lottery is that you already can be anonymous by setting up a trust. This is true, but doesn't answer the question -- how do you know it's legit? Maybe we should just cap the winnings at 10K, an amount that people wouldn't bug you so much for and change the odds such that the revenue the state gets is the same. Then everyone wins, no? So, in this case, instead of a single winner of 580M you could've had 60 thousand people win 10K instead. Sounds pretty good. An amount high enough that you'd give it a shot for a buck, but not so high that you'd annoy them if they won.
- CGamesPlay 9y ago> 1. You might argue that auditors and other government officials would enforce integrity. However, it would be trivial to bribe them. This seems like a very casual way to dismiss governmental integrity. Can't you apply this argument to any financial gain you could get from the government? e.g. "You might argue that auditors and other government officials would force people to pay taxes. However, it would be trivial to bribe them."
- tabeth 9y agoApologies for my cynicism, but given that this happens pretty frequently [1] I can't ignore the incentives when dealing with such large amounts of money. [1] http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2018/02/tax_credit_bribery_scheme_deta.html http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2018/02/tax_cre... [2] http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/harford/aegis/ph-ag-army-contractor-indicted-0302-story.html http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/harford/aegis/ph-a... [3] http://www.wjcl.com/article/chatham-area-transit-contractor-convicted-of-bribery-fraud/19410216 http://www.wjcl.com/article/chatham-area-transit-contractor-... Transparency is a good way of preventing corruption. I don't have a citation off hand, but I'm pretty confident that this is true. I'll dig one up if you're curious.
- inteleng 9y agoWhat if the woman is actually an employee of MUSL and faked a ticket, though? Would any of the public be able to find out?
- lalaithion 9y agoBut not her gender, apparently.
- AckSyn 9y agoSafe to say that "their" identity is still a secret in light of that careless opsec blunder.
- jessaustin 9y agoHow do we know?
- mrleiter 9y agoIn Austria, and Europe afaik, it is common practice not to disclose the name of the winner, only the location. It is done so for privacy reasons. I was always wondering why in the US this was different and always found it a bit strange. But I do understand now.
- marpstar 9y agoWe Americans love the ol' "poor old man ascends from the ashes of the lower-middle class because he grabbed a PowerBall ticket with his sixer of Miller Lite" story. It sells more tickets.
- BrandoElFollito 9y agoIn France it is the location of the entity which sold the ticket (which they proudly advertise via "10000 EUR won here!")
- rdtsc 9y ago> I was always wondering why in the US this was different and always found it a bit strange. But I do understand now. To promote the lottery."So and so won, I saw her on TV, I can win too" is a lot more convincing than "Someone from another town somewhere won".
- kevindqc 9y agoWhat to do if you win: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/whats_the_happiest_5word_sentence_you_could_hear/chb38xf/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/whats_the...
- almostApatriot1 9y agoFrom what I understand about this case, she wrote her name on the ticket, and once you do that, the state is in charge of whether or not that name gets revealed because removing the name would invalidate the ticket, legally. So a judge basically said, "Well, we can break the law here and force the state to keep your name private because I say so; I'm a judge." All the arguments about privacy and stuff, were really about whether it would be fair to break the law or now, not necessarily because they had some sort of legal standing. No wonder people don't have faith in the American legal system.
- detaro 9y ago> "Well, we can break the law here What law is being broken? The state not getting it's will doesn't mean a law has been broken.
- almostApatriot1 9y agoTicket invalidation.
- detaro 9y agoThe ticket isn't changed though (from the previous coverage, that was suggested and rejected as not being possible). The court just told the lottery that its procedure of handling tickets with a name on them isn't always legal. Unless there is a specific piece of law that requires the winner being made public, and that hasn't been in any of the reporting I've seen (and would be odd given the trust-workaround), there is no law being broken by this. Note how in the article it says The state had argued that the names of lottery winners must be disclosed to ensure that prizes are distributed fairly and that winners are not related to lottery employees., not The state argued it is legally required to disclose the names. Even in your first comment, you say the state is in charge of whether or not that name gets revealed, for which it just got a constraint imposed on how to make it's decision.
- mikeash 9y agoCan you be more specific? I’m not an expert on New Hampshire lottery law, but I see no indication in the article that identifying the winner is a legal requirement, merely a strong desire of the lottery agency.
- HedgehogAmp 9y agoThis is what blockchain technology would actually be perfect for.
- HedgehogAmp 9y agoBlockchain technology, period.
- davidcamel 9y agoAnd yet the comments from her lawyer detail reveal how much money she's donated to which charities. So much for anonymity! Between that, her gender, her home town, and even the name of her lawyer, there's WAY too much PII to pretend her identity is a mystery.
- m3kw9 9y agoYou can donate anonymously
- nezzle 9y agoirrelevant. In fact, knowing just four random pieces of information was enough to reidentify 90 percent of the shoppers as unique individuals and to uncover their records, researchers calculated. https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/29/with-a-few-bits-of-data-researchers-identify-anonymous-people/ https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/29/with-a-few-bits-of...
- dsacco 9y agoI’ve done research on credit card data like that. I can tell you both experientially and mathematically that four bits of random information is insufficient to identify people. The information was not anonymized and they were tracking people engaging in a common, narrow activity. Not only that, but they were only tracking 1.1 million individuals. They had a relatively small search space and significant non-random information with which to bootstrap the deanonymization. Calling that “four bits” is disingenuous. Contrast this with trying to identify a single individual in a population with no other information about them. It would take about 33 bits if we knew absolutely nothing about her, given log_2(7,280,000,000) = 32.7. But we know she’s American, so we can cut our search space down to 322,000,000. That leaves us with 28 bits. We also know she’s a woman, so we can cut our search space down by 50%. Now we have 27 bits to go. I can virtually guarantee you an analysis of anonymous donation patterns will not meaningfully cut down the search space beyond a few more bits, and that’s exceptionally non-random data. The more useful information is knowing that she resides in New Hampshire, but that still only brings us down to approximately 20 bits.
- m3kw9 9y agoMost likely, the disclosure would lose her a few friends and change everything in your current and future relationships. Very smart lady!
- steffan 9y ago> Most likely, the disclosure would lose her a few friends and change everything in your current and future relationships. Very smart lady! Not sure why it would change my current and future relationships, but if that's the case, I owe her thanks.
- mrhappyunhappy 9y agoProbably more than that, lawsuits, assaults, roberry, death to name a few issues.
- SmellyGeekBoy 9y agoI keep seeing this same sentiment... Where on earth do you people live!?
- yubiox 9y agoNo person should have to pay $300 million in tax for any reason whatsoever.
- recursive 9y agoHow did you come to that conclusion?
- soneil 9y agoThey basically have to. I get the notion than it doesn't seem fair, that no person is using a $300m share of the state's resources. But math just doesn't back it up. The US federal budget is somewhere around 4 trillion dollars. A quick google suggests income tax is 47% of federal revenue. The US has a population of about 323 million. Plugging these all together gives me a federal revenue of about $6k per person, per year. The alternative to it being "fair" to ask a lottery winner for $300m tax, is for it to be "fair" to tax every man, woman and child that $6k per year. That almost sounds doable, but that's $6k per retiree, $6k per one-year-old. $6k per unemployed or student. There's a lot of people you simply can't get that money from - so it has to come from somewhere else. It isn't fair, it's reality. (For the lottery in particular, there's a simple solution. Lottery winnings aren't taxed here, the ticket is. Not only does this mean no $300m tax bill on a $500m win, but it also means all those silly little wins are taxed fairly too.)
- etiam 9y agoI don't understand what it would mean to tax the ticket. Could you elaborate on that?
- AlexCoventry 9y agoAnyone got a link to the decision? Why don't journalists tend to link to primary sources?
- kvhdude 9y agoThere is something about lottery winning (easy money perhaps?) that attracts trouble. There are so many millionaires in tech world of acquisitions and IPOs that made so much more. Most never got into lottery winner kinds of trouble.
- breitling 9y agoI imagine business people hide their money in corporations to avoid personal liability issues.
- jstarfish 9y agoIt's just more of the lower class preying upon itself. They understand the rules and stakes of the game within the scope of their own world. Bubba Ray may be fooled by a slip-and-fall scam, but try that shit on Warren Buffet and you'll be dealing with his team of lawyers. Bubba Ray opts for the lump sum instead of the annuity. Anybody with a gun knows he has easy access to it-- try that shit on Bill Gates and you'll be lucky if you can get more than $400 from his ATM card, what with his billions being tied up in various investment vehicles. On rare occasion you end up with situations like the Getty fiasco but it's much easier (and draws less attention) if you stick to just ripping off the little people. The rules of the game change when you go big-league and you'll quickly find yourself in over your head.
- Sniffnoy 9y agoNon-mobile link: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/us/lottery-winner-privacy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/us/lottery-winner-privacy...
- dang 9y agoGood catch. Changed from https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/us/lottery-winner-privacy.html?ribbon-ad-idx=14&rref=us&module=Ribbon&version=context®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=U.S.&pgtype=article&referer=https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/83xzw5/winner_of_560_million_powerball_can_keep_her_name/ https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/us/lottery-winner-priv....
- losteverything 9y agoI bet this person's letter carrier and/or the post office where she resides will know or have a very high and good guess at who she is
- Dowwie 9y agoHow is it that people worth a lot more money manage to walk the earth among us mere mortals without being preyed upon like these lottery winners? 24x7 security detail? light sabers? both?
- DoreenMichele 9y agoInvisible conceal carry light sabers.