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posted by martyb on Sunday September 17 2017, @05:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the chance-reporting dept.

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.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 17 2017, @04:34PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 17 2017, @04:34PM (#569420)

    And how long would it take to scratch off 10 million tickets? You could also ask him what he did with all of the losers and check the land fill.