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.
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.
There are online services where you can buy lottery tickets from other countries.
This works because not all lotteries require you to be a resident of the country [0].
I guess operations like these would have a pretty good dataset of players/winners approachable for some shady international money movements?
I remember reading about Puerto Rican mafia bosses doing this to show an explanation for how they could afford their lifestyles. It was either known in the community that winners could be sold for cash or they'd have a deal with the stores selling the tickets. Some tickets win big right away and others are brought back to the store for confirmation.
Yeah? Where would one find genuine winners? It's not like there's an open market for this, and since winners are random people they are unlikely to be aware of black markets. Paying them a premium is obvious.
I'm not too sure about people who are winning scratchies or state lotteries, but there is a fairly well-regulated black market among high-stakes gamblers for losing horse-racing (etc.) tickets. You use them to lay off other winnings so that you don't pay tax. I imagine people looking to wash money also have a market for winning tickets.
It's kind of perverse that Americans pay taxes on gambling AT ALL. The rake is already being taxed, so why tax the winners? It's criminal.
Lots of things are taxed in multiple ways. Income tax and sales tax, or employee and employer FICA for instance.
The tax structure should generally be simpler, but choosing to tax or not tax particular activities is hardly criminal, especially if the intent is to reduce the attractiveness of those activities (tobacco and alcohol come to mind, in addition to gambling)
> The US banking system easily detects large cash deposits under 10k even into bank accounts, and then confiscates the money.
so you are conflating two concepts because first you are depositing $75,000 in this example.
and no they don't confiscate it just because of that, they will freeze it because of your poor explanation.
and if your explanation still sucks, the bank will unfreeze it and give you your money but close your account.
it will appear confiscated if you can't accept your account being frozen and argue the point, which will only raise more flags from more people in the institution.
but if your explanation was good, and by good I mean generic, then you won't encounter any problems.
the deposits over $10,000 will be reported to the government, but then its just the government's problem, and if the transaction wasn't actually problematic then you don't have a problem.
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.
In Spain politician Carlos Fabra won more than 2 million euros in several lotteries, now is in jail and being investigated for corruption. It's famous in Spain for that and for having built an airport that it's empty with almost no flights at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castell%C3%B3n%E2%80%93Costa_A...
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.
There have been lots of groups that have made lots of money by intelligently playing specific MA lottery games at specific times, so those 300m tickets might be real.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.)
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.
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...
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.
As a parent you would have had to have been insane to leave your kids to live with MJ, not to sure I'd call it lucky.
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.
Yeah, that was a whole other story. Initially, the family jumped to MJ's defence in the local press, then when the lawsuits started happening, they filed one too, saying that the son had been interfered with (!) - it was all really surreal and odd. Lost touch completely with that family now - no idea what they are up to, but I hope they lost that infatuation with winning prizes and accolades and are happily settled somewhere...
> 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.
For example, I relish in the fact that I'm not poor enough to feel taxed by it. By simply having a lot of more money than people on the other side of the bell curve, I can buy more tickets, and roll the winning tickets into more purchases of tickets. Or use some of the free income from dividends or bond coupons to buy lottery tickets for giggles, all while other people parrot the "tax on the stupid/poor" mantra.
The amount of money scales and it also doesn't matter.
Yeah I've seen some papers on it. I would not consider myself a whale, just someone that rationally plays it and is privileged that my portion of income used on the game is not detrimental to my well being. The poor spend likely comparable amounts of money on it, but percentage wise it is harmful.
Most money games depend on the whales, and there is a depressing underbelly to that aspect of it as well.
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?
I don't believe that odds in favor of a player happen in lotteries, except for rare 'bugs' in the game design, which are fixed as soon as the organizer spots them.
A more probable explanation are addicts or money laundering.
> I don't believe that odds in favor of a player happen in lotteries, except for rare 'bugs' in the game design, which are fixed as soon as the organizer spots them.
Re: Gaming the system - I am not 100% sure, but the basic lottery is picking 7 numbers from a total of 45 that are drawn each week.
Those normal games are around $15-$20. However, you can buy 'System' entries in the games where you can pick 8, 9 or 10 numbers in a game. That obviously increases your chances of winning, but become increasingly expensive. I believe buying a 10 number system in a game is something in the order of $5000 or similar?
I know there are sites that show lottery draw numbers picked going back many decades. Coin toss theory aside, I am assuming that if someone was to analyse all those numbers and do a statistical probability analysis of the frequency of all 45 numbers, they could form a basic idea of what numbers would likely come up? Combine that with a group of large system entries which increases your chance of winning, and it may be worthwhile.
Like I said above, we are talking six figure sums of money here. If it was just a rich addict without any pattern, then I would expect to see lots of outgoings, but no winnings, however, the winnings with these particular customers seems to be on par with their spending, on a totally random draw, which seems to indicate to me that they have worked out a way to bring up their win/loss ration to at least equivalence, and tipped slightly in their favour.
As others have mentioned, it would be impossible to 'game' the system in that way, unless there's something fishy going on.
Perhaps these people are re-selling the lottery tickets. I can imagine there are ways to earn a lot of money doing that. Naturally, the amount of tickets you'd order would reflect demand for tickets.
How would they control the odds of winning? Luck aside, and especially when you buy lottery tickets in bulk, the odds are definitely against the player. Is there something I'm not aware of?
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.
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?
The article suggests that people who owe back taxes or certain legal fees would have their winnings garnished. So they find a "clean" ostensible winner to claim the winnings, presumably paying him or her a smaller fee.
IIRC, from a NICAR listserv discussion with the Florida reporter, it's not that the claimed winners actually bought the tickets from the ticket dispensers. It's that the actual purchasers of the winning ticket sell it to these frequent buyers at a slight discount, so that they (the actual purchasers) don't have a financial paper trail. Not necessarily for tax purposes (the second-hand buyer would have to eventually pay for that), but for things like child support and divorce alimony.
Searched through my old emails and here are a couple of excerpts (from Mower, and various other reporters responding to the thread):
> "Once we zeroed in on these "prolific" winners, we discovered other bizarre patterns. They were winning from dozens of stores across multiple counties, would start their winning streaks out of the blue (versus spotty wins over a long period of time) and most were owners or clerks at places that sold tickets (we had to do that research on our own)."
> A lot of tickets are second-hand, which may well be illegal and is probably often used as a dodge around child-support payments
edit: In terms of why it doesn't raise red flags, it's because in most bureaucratic systems, there just aren't red flags built into databases and record-keeping. Florida is probably by far one of the best states in terms of transparent and computer/machine-readable recordkeeping, but someone has to have the initiative to do the analysis, even if it's just a simple SQL query. From an unrelated investigation from another Florida outlet about bad cops getting rehired:
> This was a case where the government had this wonderful, informative dataset and they weren’t using it at all except to compile the information. I remember talking to one person at an office and saying: “How could you guys not know some of this? In five minutes of (SQL) queries you know everything about these officers?” They basically said it wasn't their job. That left a huge opportunity for us.
edit 2: In the case of the original Florida story by the Palm Beach Post, it appears that the actual problem was that clerks were actively deceiving and stealing from the winners:
> The stores that sell lottery tickets in Florida all have a machine that will scan a ticket and determine if it’s a winner. People who buy the tickets bring them back to stores to see if they’ve won. But they’re often relying on the store clerks to tell the truth about what the machine says. So the clerks can tell the buyer, “Hey, sorry man, better luck next time,” and then pocket the guy’s winning ticket.
Your proposed rule contains a great fraud opportunity: pay someone in government to "accidentally" waste money and then "uncover" it to cash out 5% of the waste.
That's a good point - to be honest I hadn't considered that. However, government officials already have the opportunity to 'accidentally' waste money by paying more than necessary for goods or services, then getting a kickback from the supplier. Most likely the kickback would be more than 5%.
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:
How does he do that? The IRS allows you to deduct up to the amount of your gambling winnings, so you wouldn't get a refund, unless the state was automatically withholding some of his winnings.
There is also the possibility that he set up a company that only engages in gambling, so it can have a Net Operating Loss year over year.
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.".
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.
On the contrary, as someone who lives in a place where lottery winners are allowed to remain anonymous, I find it bizarre that these states are willing to give out such full information (even for winnings as small as $600) to anyone who asks, not just to law enforcement investigating potential fraud.
The chance of your life getting ruined after winning the lottery is proportional (among other factors) to the number of people who know that you've suddenly landed a fortune and want a favor. I once read an article about people who continued to live normally after winning the lottery. Most of them only told a few people and tried not to draw attention. One man didn't even tell his wife until he lost his job a few years later and had to explain to her why she shouldn't be worried at all!
But that's going to be impossible if the state publishes your name and the exact amount of your winnings for anyone to see. They might as well publish everyone's tax records, too, including Trump's that everyone's been asking for.
When it comes to courts, you're usually dealing with printed out copies of the web pages. In most cases, that's much more convenient than dealing with an HTML page saved to disk.
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.
Are you saying the evidence I provide is wrong? You seriously believe the lottery is perfectly designed? That's like saying cars/airbags/computers/etc. are always perfectly designed.
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)
Well, the lottery is supposed to be statistically random. If you live in an area with lots of lightning and your job involves being outside up high with metal you might be at an above average risk for getting hit. People aren't supposed to have better chances of winning the lottery than the next player.
You're being serious? I don't mean to be overly hostile, but the implications would be world-shattering and the "mundane" explanation is quite sufficient. Also lottery-winning psychics wouldn't get caught.
It is absolutely possible to influence an outcome based on thoughts. There are countless studies on this effect. Psychics in that sense don't foresee the future, they influence the outcome of the future. For example, the most common way to know what someone is thinking is for them to tell you, but I believe thoughts have another medium of transfer which is not well understood yet. Think about wavelength, radio frequencies, etc. Just because you can't see/touch it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Btw try this: close your nose and mouth and think about something, you'll realize that you're kind of talking/transferring your thoughts in the air.
The mundane explanations doesn't answer anything. It's just pure speculation. They didn't eben talk to the guy who had the most frequent wins. Why wouldn't psychics get caught?
Well, let's assume for a second that psychics exist and know that they are psychic. The second assumption is kind of important as if they just act on impulse without knowing they're psychic we can't really differentiate that from all the other chance winnings on a hunch.
For the Powerball, two ways to play: pick your own numbers or randomly generate them. Would a winning psychic choose one over the other more often? An ability to sense and know the future means they would have to either know the winning numbers and pick them, know the machine that produces the numbers (but not necessarily the numbers themselves), or somehow manipulate chance or psychics so that the lottery machine produces the psychic's number during the draw.
Psychic is kind of loosely defined right now by your question so for convenience let's rule out the last one since that's more telekinetic/magic than psychic.
With these conditions, we should see some pattern from the winner: they would either always pick their own and get the winning numbers or they would always happen to go to the right machine at the right time.
Both should show pretty consistent behavior on the part of a psychic, as we can see that the bar for big winnings is pretty low ($600) and multiple statistically improbable winnings would likely be investigated. (per the atriclr, only 10 states do not investigate frequent winners).
So to summarize so far:
Frequent winners very likely investigated unless they are in the 10 states
Psychic will likely pick their own numbers
Psychic will go to a specific machine and have erratic pattern of purchase
If psychic are playing the lottery, my assumptions lead me to think that it makes no sense to frequently win, instead banking on a single explainable big win. This of course would be only if the psychic did not want to be found out as a psychic, which for the purpose of the lottery I think would be a valid want as I believe that there are rules about additional knowledge, etc meant to catch people defrauding the lottery. Future-visions would most definitely qualify, so probably would require that the psychic forfeit their winnings.
The mundane explanations do explain a lot, both from the investigations and admissions from the frequent winners. To me anyways, the psychics, if they exist, would more likely be the one time big winners, not the frequent ones.
Good points, but continuing with the thought experiment, I think you fail to consider what might be a reality for your psychics. What if the psychics don't have perfect information, nor perfect control, but have, perhaps varying on the psychic in question, some amount of power that lets them see or control future numbers with some amount of probability, but not certainty?
In that case, they might win more often, but not every time. Given that so many things in nature follow a power curve or a bell curve, I think your presumed psychic abilities, we can assume, follow the same curves, and if most of your psychics then have "some ability" to predict these numbers, but not a certainty, then I think they are more likely to be frequent smaller winners.
For example, if you have an ability that let's you see a 4/8 of the future numbers, with 33% certainty, then one time out of three, you will win 4/8 of the numbers, and sometimes more than 4/8 if you're lucky.
TL;DR -- your presumed psychic abilities probably exist on a spectrum ( bell / power curve ) and likely most of your psychics do not have "perfect" future information.
PS - I have a feeling that psychics would prefer to play the stock market, than lottery. I just sense their expected payoff is higher in that case, probably because there are a lot more factors that affect a stock price, so even partial information across a lot of these seems to provide a better advantage, than partial information on 1 single list of numbers.
That's fair. I certainly did forget to include the assumption that they would have perfect clarity into their foresight.
I still think you'd see a pretty clear pattern emerge from winners however, at least should the individual grasp the impact of their ability, even if the picture is incomplete. I also agree stocks or sports betting would be a better choice as partial information seems more valuable in those cases.
But I still feel confident you'd see the same general truths from psychics with partial clarity; still picking numbers and never using random and still an erratic purchase pattern as they chase locations and time. I think the former would likely show more purchases with the same constant numbers from the futuresight and then a spread of other numbers; such behavior may stand out even more as there would be a history of them always getting a small subset right and guessing the rest.
The most obvious difference would be people who picked their numbers would have better winning than expected. Which is easy to check, but does not happen.
What is the burden of evidence you have for the mundane explanations? That is, what would they have to show to you for you to believe them beyond a reasonable doubt? Technically, every possible criminal act conceivable in our known universe could be blamed on an invisible, time-traveling Hitler.
Ever hear of Occam's Razor? We have two broad options, a small set of people who are psychic, have kept it secret for the entire history of humanity, and use it to win the lottery but in almost no other context that we know of or have recognized.
The other option is that these frequent winners are surrogates for others who can or would not hand in their lottery ticket on their own.
The parent poster is "serious" in the sense that I bet literally every person reading this had the idea of psychics briefly cross their mind as they read it.
The problem is that psychics don't exist and the people who believe in them are unscientific. So it is the same as asking "Could God have favored these winners? Could it be divine providence"?
That has no place in the article.
If there were even half a sentence in the article stating something like:
Are they psychics
------------------
As a fanciful aside we analyzed whether the winners involved could be psychics.
The effect is not strong enough for that: a psychic could win 3 or 4 lotteries in a
row, for example. A 1 in 10 million * 1 in 300 million is still much weaker than
what a psychic could produce. The improbability is not strong enough to show psychc
ability.
Less fancifully, prediction of the results through some other means outside of psychic
ability (such as by predicting the random number generator used), would show the same
effect, also not present.
The problem is that this validates "psychic ability" (which does not exist), in much the same way as a paragraph about God does.
Imagine if the article had written:
Is it Allah's will?
-------------------
We asked our statistician whether the statistics show this may simply be the will of
Allah. Our statistician stopped replying to our mail at that point, so that this
analysis is inconclusive.
The reason the statistician would stop replying to mail at that point is that nobody wants to mix statistics with religious beliefs. It just completely derails the conversation.
I don't think that this HN thread will end up completely derailing anything, but just for your information, psychics don't exist, nobody in the world is psychic to any extent.
(Some people are very good at reading information that is very subtle, however, and making inferences. Obviously this does not translate to predicting lottery numbers.)
Psychics do exist and some of them don't even know they have this ability.
I have a friend whose Father is always winning at the race track. I asked him did he have some system and he says he just feels it. He could have psychic ability and not even know it like some lottery players might have.
Science also tells us that the future can influence the past. Like Einstein said the distinctions between past, present and future is just a persistent illusion.
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...