Improbably Frequent Lottery Winners
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Re: Improbably Frequent Lottery Winners
#2I 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?
Re: Improbably Frequent Lottery Winners
#3That'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...
Re: Improbably Frequent Lottery Winners
#4I 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?
> Is there some reason that people might buy winning lottery tickets?
Money laundering maybe. It wouldn't make much sense for the seller.
Re: Improbably Frequent Lottery Winners
#5I 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.
Re: Improbably Frequent Lottery Winners
#6I 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?
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:
https://ire.org/blog/on-the-road/2011/12/20/behind-story-tra...
> 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:
http://archives.cjr.org/united_states_project/palm_beach_pos...
> 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.
In other states, the problem is money laundering.
Re: Improbably Frequent Lottery Winners
#7This 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...
Re: Improbably Frequent Lottery Winners
#8I 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.
Re: Improbably Frequent Lottery Winners
#9I 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?
See the "real article" [0] that this one links to; it lists several.
[0]: http://www.pennlive.com/watchdog/2017/09/defying_the_odds_pa...
Re: Improbably Frequent Lottery Winners
#10I 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'…
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.