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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?

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. 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

  9. 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.

  10. 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 facts
What bank should i put my lottery winnings in?

Lottery Winnings data charts

For your convenience take a look at Lottery Winnings figures with stats and charts presented as graphic.

lottery winnings fact data chart about Analysis of UK Instant Win Lottery Games by type
Analysis of UK Instant Win Lottery Games by type

lottery winnings fact data chart about Odds of winning Powerball (Lottery) vs guessing one bitcoin
Odds of winning Powerball (Lottery) vs guessing one bitcoin private key

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.

lottery winnings fact infographic about Gambling: How 'Easy' it is to Win the Lottery just by Choosi

Gambling: How 'Easy' it is to Win the Lottery just by Choosing 6 Numbers Out of 49


When are lottery winnings taxed?

Your chance of winning a Mega Millions lottery is like knowing a hedgehog will sneeze once and only once in the next six years and putting your money down on one particular second and only winning if the one sneeze happens exactly at that second.

In 2009 a woman caused a riot at a Columbus, Ohio, Burlington Coat Factory after it became clear to customers, whom she had offered store-wide to purchase all orders up to $500 from her lottery winnings, that she had no money.

A “Tontine” is an arrangement where a group of people buy into a lottery, and whoever lives the longest wins the entire pot.

You are twice as likely to win the jackpot in the mega millions lottery than you are to win the $1million prize from McDonald's monopoly

Many of China's lottery winners have donned masks (and some even full costumes) when claiming their multi-million prizes. This has led to photos of people dressed as Baymax, yellow bears, and even a giant panda holding the novelty cheques of their winnings.

How lottery winnings are paid?

Jack Whittaker, who won the largest jackpot in history and donated much of his winnings, before a string of horrible luck. He was robbed, lost his wife to divorce and his granddaughter and daughter to suicide. He later said that winning the lottery was the worst thing to ever happen to him.

The largest lottery win ever was $ 941.8 million.

A software developer rigged the lottery software he coded in several states, so he would know what the winning numbers would be 3 days per year.

Choose numbers higher than 31 if playing the lottery. Not better odds of winning, but decreases the chance you must share your prize. People use birthday dates as a number, and no date falls higher than 31.

There are only 11 master cicerones (aka beer sommeliers) in the world and becoming one requires both winning a lottery & having an "encyclopedic knowledge and an in-depth understanding of all issues related to brewing, beer and beer service."

A woman named Glenda Blackwell once bought a scratch-off lottery ticket to prove to her husband that it was a waste of money and she ended up winning $1 million.

$2.04 billion in lottery winnings went unclaimed in 2013.

The head of Serbia's popular State Lottery was forced to resign after the winning numbers of a 'random' drawing appeared to television viewers before they were drawn

After 6 months, winning the lottery does not make households happier, nor do neighbours’ winnings reduce happiness.

About an Australian man who was legally dead for 14 minutes, but came back to life to win the lottery twice.

Tom Crist, who won a $40 million lottery jackpot and gave all of his winnings away in memory of his late wife.

In 1992, an Australian investment firm bought 5 million of the possible 7 million different lottery number combinations, resulting in over 27 million in winnings.

In 2003, Mohan Srivastava, cracked the Ontario Lottery's "tic-tac-toe" scratch-and-win game. He could spot winners by sight only with a 90% accuracy. After determined that exploiting this would net him less income than his current job, he instead notified the game makers.

A Marriage Lottery existed in London for over 100 years where men could win a wife.

Canadians have to answer simple math questions to win sweepstakes, which prevent the contests from being deemed illegal lotteries

This is our collection of basic interesting facts about Lottery Winnings. The fact lists are intended for research in school, for college students or just to feed your brain with new realities. Possible use cases are in quizzes, differences, riddles, homework facts legend, cover facts, and many more. Whatever your case, learn the truth of the matter why is Lottery Winnings so important!

Editor Veselin Nedev Editor