"This is such a serious problem for criminals that the mafia has been known to play the lottery as a form of money laundering." I wanted to comment on this tha

"This is such a serious problem for criminals that the mafia has been known to play the lottery as a form of money laundering." I wanted to comment on this that if you are referring to what I think you're referring to, it's not quite how you make it seem. The expected yield on a lottery ticket is somewhere in the magnitude of 50-70%, meaning: if you buy a lot of tickets, you will probably get a net yield of something between those numbers. However, the large amounts of tickets you have to buy / check / redeem do not make this a viable laundering strategy. You'll leave traces if you do this at scale, for example if you bought the owner of a local bodega to get you tickets 'wholesale', like boxes at a time; then the lotteries will easily spot patterns of sellers doing unusual transactions. What I think you are referring to, is the (alleged) practice of criminals paying above-market prices (in cash) for casino chips or lottery tickets. Let's say you win $100. For a criminal, if he pays you $110 for that ticket, he has a laundering cost of only 9%, because he can redeem that ticket as 100$ in clean money. 9% is quite cheap; it's not uncommon to account for 30, 40% in costs when laundering money. And since lotteries and casinos are about big amounts, you only need one such transaction to launder sizable amounts. As the original winner, you end up with more than you won, but you can spend it only on holidays, restaurants and other cash-friendly activities. (all examples are ignoring taxes etc, for which you'd have to correct to make the numbers work in reality)