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Just how lucky are regular lottery winners?
00:10:04
How statistics were used to show how unlikely it is to win hundreds of times by chance.
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- [00:02]
A
Hello and welcome to More or less on the BBC World Service. I'm Charlotte MacDonald, and today we're going on a journey to discover how statistics can be used to investigate a mystery. In 2014, Lawrence Mower, a journalist with the Palm Beach Post in Florida, became suspicious about his state lottery. A lottery is a competition where if you buy a ticket, you have the chance of winning a big cash prize, but the odds are normally stacked against you, and it's very hard to win. Lawrence got hold of a list of Florida's lottery winners that included people who were winning prizes of more than US$600 on scratch cards, as well as games where you have to match numbers to a lottery draw.
- [00:52]
B
Just kind of on a whim, I'm kind of like, well, I'm just curious who's won the most often of any lottery game? And the results were highly suspicious to me.
- [01:01]
A
People weren't just winning a few times. I mean, the same individuals kept winning prizes again and again and again and again. One person claimed 252 winning tickets. I mean, what, what are the chances of people winning the lottery on such a regular basis?
- [01:25]
B
I came from Las Vegas. That's where I grew up. And I thought personally, being from Vegas, if this was a casino, they would be taking you into a back room and figuring out how you're winning so often.
- [01:35]
A
Lawrence managed to track down some of these winners and asked them how had they won so often.
- [01:41]
B
And of course, their responses were nonsensical. One person told me he dreamed in numbers.
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A
But being suspicious wasn't enough.
- [01:52]
B
The big question really was, okay, I know that these people are winning a lot, but theoretically, you could win as much as you want if you spend a lot of money. So the big question was, how much would you have to spend to win so often?
- [02:06]
A
Lawrence enlisted the help of statisticians to look at the probabilities of winning multiple times. It turned out that his hunch was right.
- [02:15]
B
A couple days after our stories ran, they started shutting down stores. They raided one store where the number one winner was cashing tickets.
- [02:24]
A
Investigators found that the man who claimed the most lottery wins, 252 was in fact doing it on behalf of other people who didn't want their details known to the authorities. He was being paid a fee to claim it. But in a lot of people's cases, we don't know if it was anything more than luck. Since Lawrence broke his story, journalists have uncovered similar patterns of multiple winners. They all ask themselves a simple. Can it be possible that some individuals are just that lucky in The US Lotteries are run on a state by state basis, and these lotteries can include a number of different types of games, ones where a random set of balls are generated by the lottery company and you need to match those numbers with the ticket you bought. Another set of games include scratch cards or scratchers where you want to match symbols or numbers. This year, Geoff, Kelly Lowenstein and a group of journalists and students tried to get a fuller national picture.
- [03:27]
C
We wrote Freedom of Information act requests for the information that we want, and then we followed up and followed up all over the country asking for the winners data.
- [03:38]
A
When they collated the data, it certainly seemed like they were onto something.
- [03:42]
C
The number of wins were just so high. One guy won more than 1400 times from 2009 to 2016, and other people won just hundreds and hundreds of times, way more than in Florida. So we felt pretty confident that there was something unusual happening.
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A
The team found that in the past seven years, close to 1,700 players across several states have in each claimed 50 or more lottery tickets worth at least $600. But to find out if their suspicions were reasonable, they enlisted some statistical help from Philip Stark, professor of statistics at the University of California, Berkeley.
- [04:20]
D
The difficulty is we don't know how many times any of these individuals is playing. We don't know how much money they have available to put in to gambling.
- [04:30]
A
Instead, Philip created a thought experiment using the most generous parameters and assuming that people played in the most optimal way. He what are the chances of winning as frequently as those who top the list for each state? For example, in Pennsylvania, the most prolific winner had won a prize on scratch cards 209 times over a 12 year period. Phillips said, okay, let's imagine that every person in the state plays this game. All 12 million people would each have to spend $7.8 million to have a 1 in 10 million chance that any one of them would win 209 times. We know in reality that not all 12 million people in the state played the lottery over this period.
- [05:22]
D
It's a thought experiment. I mean, it contradicts reality in a number of ways. You know, for the scratch off games, it's clearly possible because there are not that many cards. Another way that the assumptions are generous to the winner is that the total amount of money that the lottery would be taking in exceeds what it's actually taking in by many orders of magnitude.
- [05:43]
A
And yet the chances of replicating someone getting 209 wins is still 1 in 10 million.
- [05:50]
D
All of these assumptions are being made simply to be Generous to the winners so that we are comfortable that we are not making false accusations again and again.
- [06:02]
A
Philip found it would have taken a lot of money and a huge number of people to be playing to expect to find these multiple wins by chance. But if it's not luck, what's going on? Well, we don't know for sure. In some cases, the authorities have started to look into these patterns. For example, in New York, some of the frequent winners have been arrested. Journalists spoke to other winners who say they've just been lucky. I managed to track down Daniel Simmons Ritchie, a journalist who worked on this recent investigation. He tells me that over the years, a few different reasons for multiple prize winners have been uncovered. We've already heard about one, where criminals buy winning tickets to launder money.
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E
So let's say I'm a drug dealer. I've accumulated a lot of money from drug sales. And my problem, a problem for a lot of criminals is how do I get this money in a bank? How do I make it look legitimate?
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A
A variation on this is something called ticket cashing or ticket discounting. This is where someone who has a winning ticket wants to avoid paying taxes. When you claim a prize of $600 or more, the lotteries inform the American tax office, the irs, if the claimant has back taxes or perhaps child support to pay, it will be deducted from their winnings. So instead they sell the ticket to someone else.
- [07:29]
E
And so the person who claims it, you know, claims it for themselves and makes a small profit.
- [07:34]
A
Some multiple winners have turned out to be store cashiers ripping off unsuspecting customers.
- [07:40]
E
I am a customer. I go to a retailer to see if my ticket is a winner. And the retailer checks it, says, no, no, you didn't win. The retailer claims it for themselves.
- [07:50]
A
This was a concern in Florida where the authorities brought in new rules for stores. Here's Geoff from the Palm Beach Post again.
- [07:57]
B
Now, if you hand your ticket to a cashier, you'll hear a chime telling you, the customer, that you won. Before, if you just handed your ticket to the cashier, you would have no idea if you won or not. Now you hear a chime so you know that you won and that the cashier isn't going to try to defraud you.
- [08:14]
A
Another way in which shop workers have cheated is by checking the scratch cards before they're sold.
- [08:19]
E
One kind of, very, kind of low tech way is something called micro scratching. And this is where if you have a scratch off ticket and you cut a very, very fine line over the barcode of the ticket and find out it's a winner.
- [08:38]
A
That's all we have time for this week. Thanks to Lawrence Mower, Geoff Kelly Lowenstein, Philip Stark and Daniel Simmons Ritchie. If you want to get in touch, email us@moreorlessbc.co.uk or tweet usbc more or less. And now here's a word about one of our other podcasts from the BBC World Service. It's a podcast making a splash Plunging
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F
deep down into water. Everywhere we go, there is something amazing. Glide in rapture neath shimmering seas, the
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A
coral reefs and all of the fish.
- [09:17]
E
All the colors in the water.
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F
Five oceans of tales and tradition.
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A
It still is the center of our culture.
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F
With the mingling brine flowing free, there
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is no boundary between them. It is one body of water.
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F
But dark clouds loom on the horizon.
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A
The ice is changing.
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F
Will the tempest become destiny?
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We're not having arctic conditions here anymore.
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F
Solutions become dissolution. A lot of our waste sinks and
- [09:44]
A
might even concentrate at the bottom of the ocean.
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F
Are we drifting desolately in the physical world?
- [09:50]
A
The thing I love most? I'm watching it slowly die. That's Ocean Stories, a brand new four part miniseries from the Compass Podcast. Join the extraordinary Journey Search for the compass wherever you get your podcasts.