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Spotted at HackerNews is a link to a multipart series from Pennsylvania's PennLive and several collaborating outlets on the wins of improbably lucky lottery players.
On, Dec. 29, 2016, Clarance Jones did something that most Americans could scarcely imagine: He cashed-in 20 winning scratch-off tickets, collectively worth $21,000, one after the other.
For the average lottery player, that would be the ultimate payday. For Jones, it was practically routine.
In the past six years, the 79-year-old from Lynn, Mass., has won more than 7,300 lottery tickets, totaling $10.8 million. That establishes him, by far, as the luckiest lottery player in America.
But that luck, experts say, is unlikely to be what it seems. And Jones is not alone in raising eyebrows
The three part series goes on to look at the patterns of frequent winners, and the attitudes of lottery retailers to these apparent runs of incredible good fortune.
In Pennsylvania alone, more than 200 players have won at least 50 prizes of $600 or more in the past 16 years.
Statisticians approached by PennLive say many of those wins are difficult to explain by luck. In other states, investigations into frequent winners have sometimes found their wins are rooted in theft and cheating, or schemes relating to tax evasion and money laundering.
"From a statistical point of view it stinks to high heaven," said Ronald Wasserstein, executive director of the American Statistical Association.
The Pennsylvania Lottery, however, has a different view: Its most frequent winners are simply frequent players.
The Original HackerNews Thread and reporting from the Columbia Journal on the FOIA requests which underly the reporting. There are associated articles in The Boston Globe, New York Daily News, Hartford Courant, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday September 17 2017, @02:57PM
A prize of a mere $500 is enough to bring out the worst conduct. Unsporting behavior, demands for application of creative interpretation of rules on opponents, playing slowly and yelling for a call or a judge every 30 seconds to further drag things out, turn the game into a stamina contest, try to bully a tired opponent into conceding, and many other things that while technically not cheating, spoil the fun. Then there's actual cheating.
When it's millions at stake, half the professional cheaters in the nation will be constantly searching for angles, and hustling and working the ones they have, if any. Endless vigilance is necessary to keep the con artists and thieves from stealing the lottery. Preventing cheating is the biggest part of running a lottery. Preventing the inside job is a very hard problem. Any lottery operation that pretends not to understand that could be staffed by imbeciles, but much, much more likely is treating the public to a steaming pile of manure in a blatant attempt to distract people from some ongoing theft. Just honest luck, yeah, right. Does the Pennsylvania Lottery think the citizens who are paying attention were all born yesterday? Probably not, but they hope this feeble excuse will play well enough anyway. Would serve them right if all their players quit.