Improbably Frequent Lottery Winners

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.

A $100,000 lottery ticket would in the US involve 30-45k in taxes for an unmarried person.

So I bet it would probably sell for around $75,000 cash up front, which is a decrease from the sticker price.

But if I was the winner, I would treat it as extremely shady and probably just go the legit route for almost any price.

The US banking system easily detects large cash deposits under 10k even into bank accounts, and then confiscates the money.

And I don't really want to keep $75,000 cash in my mattress.

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.

How does he win so much? Is he psychic?

Even you. For example, you wouldn't want to keep $75K in your mattress. Would you keep $100K? $750K? A million?