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Improbably Frequent Lottery Winners

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Re: Improbably Frequent Lottery Winners

#61

Post by monktastic1 »

quuquuquu wrote: post #39
projectant wrote: post #38

Clarance Jones http://archive.boston.com/business/articles/2011/11/05/frequ... 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?

Probably just caught a lucky break when they didn't want to search through the 20 boxes of duds he bought from 7/11 for less than the cost of paper ;)

Yeah but how did he win so much?

Edit: just read the article. Seems to be cashing in for others.

Re: Improbably Frequent Lottery Winners

#62

Post by quuquuquu »

monktastic1 wrote: post #61
quuquuquu wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably just caught a lucky break when they didn't want to search through the 20 boxes of duds he bought from 7/11 for less than the cost of paper ;)

Yeah but how did he win so much? Edit: just read the article. Seems to be cashing in for others.

Yup that's what I think too. Guy has a thing for lottery tickets as income.

Covered his tracks by keeping thousands and thousands of non-winning tickets that he probably bought bulk for pennies per box.

Feds show up and see the boxes and say "shit, this guy must have really bought 300 million bucks worth of lottery tickets!" and walk away.

Pretty bad investigstion lol

Re: Improbably Frequent Lottery Winners

#64

Post by detritus »

fergie wrote: post #14

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.

Are you sure it wasn't hashish from Morocco to Gibraltar, along with cigarettes from Gibraltar to Spain on the side?

That was the general thing going on back in the 80s and 90s when all the cool dads had their own inflatable launch :)

Re: Improbably Frequent Lottery Winners

#65

Post by planteen »

ryacko wrote: post #18

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)

Foolish activities, like hiking above treeline afternoon in the summer, greatly increase that risk.

Re: Improbably Frequent Lottery Winners

#66

Post by curun1r »

quuquuquu wrote: post #62
monktastic1 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but how did he win so much? Edit: just read the article. Seems to be cashing in for others.

Yup that's what I think too. Guy has a thing for lottery tickets as income. Covered his tracks by keeping thousands and thousands of non-winning tickets that he probably bought bulk for pennies per box. Feds show up and see the boxes and say "shit, this guy must have really bought 300 million bucks worth of lottery tickets!" and walk away. Pretty bad investigstion lol

OTOH, he could be the front man for one of the lottery syndicates mentioned in: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/how-mit...

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.

Re: Improbably Frequent Lottery Winners

#67

Post by wonderous »

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:

For example, the most winning lottery winner in America was covered by the Boston Globe in 2011: http://archive.boston.com/business/articles/2011/11/05/frequ...

[1] He's been on the radar as a ticket cashier since at least 1999 and has been getting an IRS refund for his gambling losses since 1988.

Re: Improbably Frequent Lottery Winners

#68

Post by freeflight »

Too wrote: post #29
fergie wrote: post #14

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.

Where would one find sellers of winning lottery tickets? You must either be a store clerk or wait outside for people to cash them in?

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?

[0] https://www.thebalance.com/can-non-us-residents-play-to-win-...

Re: Improbably Frequent Lottery Winners

#69

Post by jmharvey »

curun1r wrote: post #25
jmharvey wrote: post #11

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…

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 :-) [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/busine…

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.)

Re: Improbably Frequent Lottery Winners

#70

Post by carlisle_ »

romeopov wrote: post #17
gboudrias wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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.

What follows the razor?

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