Lottery Winnings facts
While investigating facts about Lottery Winnings Calculator and Lottery Winnings Tax, I found out little known, but curios details like:
After a waitress at a pizzeria helped a customer choose the numbers for a winning lottery ticket in 1984, he 'tipped' her $3,000,000 - half of his $6,000,000 prize money.
how lottery winnings are taxed?
Wife bought a scratch-off lottery ticket to prove a point to her husband that it was a waste of money, but it ended up winning her $1 million.
What to do with lottery winnings?
In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across answering what happens to unclaimed lottery winnings. Here are 50 of the best facts about Lottery Winnings After Taxes and Lottery Winnings Tax Calculator I managed to collect.
what lottery winnings are taxable?
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A woman who has won the Lottery four times since 1993. She was outed as a PhD of Statistics from Standford University and had figured out the pseudo-number generator for the distribution of the winning tickets. She won a total of $17million, and has since moved to Las Vegas.
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A California woman won $1.3 million in the lottery and filed for divorce 11 days later. She didn’t tell her husband, and two years later her husband found out all about it and sued her. The Judge awarded her husband all of her winnings.
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If you won the lottery in Australia, you had to go public with your win, turning into an overnight celebrity. This was until the abduction & murder of Graeme Thorne, 8, whose family won the lottery leading to Graeme being abducted for ransom but killed.
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Iowa Man Tyler Heep won $1.00 from a scratch-off, drove to Lottery Headquarters, and demanded a gigantic novelty check. They wrote him out an oversized check and had him hold it up for a photo in a room set up with a camera and the Lottery logo. Heep used his winnings to buy 1/2 a gallon of gas.
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In 2006, a bank manager in China stole $26,000 from the bank. His plan was to purchase lottery tickets with the intent of winning enough that he could return the money before the theft was discovered and still have some left over for himself. Despite the odds, his plan succeeded.
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Stockholm, Sweden tested a "Speed Camera Lottery" where speed limit-abiding drivers were automatically entered into a drawing to win a prize pool funded out of fines paid by speeders.
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In Taiwan, store receipts come with a free lottery number printed at the top, and winning numbers are drawn every two months. The initiative has been running over 60 years, and encourages businesses and consumers to keep good records.
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A woman married 25 years who quickly divorced her husband without telling him she had just won the lottery was forced to pay him all of her winnings
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Frane Selak, an 85 year old who narrowly survived a train crash which killed 17, being blown out of a plane which killed 19, a bus accident which killed 4, 2 car explosions, being hit by a bus, and narrowly avoided being hit by a truck, TO THEN go on and win the lottery.
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A man cracked the code to winning scratch lottery tickets, but calculated it would only net him $600/day and instead of secretly plundering the game, he decided to report the problem to the Lottery and Gaming Corporation.
Lottery Winnings data charts
For your convenience take a look at Lottery Winnings figures with stats and charts presented as graphic.
Why does the government take half of lottery winnings?
You can easily fact check why does the government tax lottery winnings by examining the linked well-known sources.
After winning 17 Million in the Florida lottery in '06, Abraham Shakespeare went missing in '09 and was found in '10 buried under a concrete slab of an acquaintance's home
A Stanford statistician has won almost $21 million by winning the lottery FOUR times - source
In 2009, Stanford MBA students were given $5 and told the generate as much revenue as possible. Some teams bought lottery tickets or used slot machines but the winning team made $650 by selling its presentation slot to a small local company - source
Bill Morgan, who after having a near death experience buys a lottery ticket winning a car. His local news then asked him to do a reenactment for them and scratch another ticket, on which he won $250,000.
A woman who has won the Lottery four times since 1993. She was outed as a PhD of Statistics from Standford University and had figured out the pseudo-number generator for the distribution of the winning tickets. She allegedly still spends 2 months a year playing scratchers to win again. - source
When do you pay taxes on lottery winnings?
A statistician who discovered the outside of a particular scratch-off lottery game was non random. He could correctly predict a winning ticket 90% of the time.
How lottery winnings are paid out?
It's more likely you will survive a plane crash or win the lottery than click a banner ad.
In Sweden, there is a speed camera lottery where good drivers can win money from the fines of speeding drivers through a concept called gamification
Ren Xiaofeng, a manager of The Agricultural Bank of China, stole $26,000 from the bank with the intention of buying lottery tickets, winning, and repaying the initial theft. Against the odds, it worked so he tried again with $6.7 million. He lost all but $95,000 and was sentenced to death.
In Stockholm, they have a lottery where good drivers can win the money bad drivers pay in fines
A $1 bill received in a balloon from South Korean activists buys 9 pounds of corn, and is like winning the lottery for some in North Korea.
Lottery winnings infographics
Beautiful visual representation of Lottery Winnings numbers and stats to get perspecive of the whole story.