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The Hot Lotto ticket nobody could claim
The $16.5 million prize that went unclaimed because claiming it would have exposed the fraud.
This is the Tipton case from the other end, and it is the best illustration of why anonymity rules exist and why they are also a problem.
The winning Iowa ticket was bought in December 2010. Nothing happened for nearly a year. Then, days before the deadline, a New York law firm attempted to claim it on behalf of a Belize trust, refusing to name the person behind it.
Iowa refused, its rules required identifying the buyer, and the claim was withdrawn rather than answered. A $16.5 million prize was voluntarily abandoned, which is such strange behaviour that it triggered the investigation that unravelled everything.
It is also the clearest illustration of the tension in anonymity rules. Every argument for letting winners stay private is an argument that made this fraud easier to attempt, and every argument for publishing names is an argument that ends with the stories elsewhere in this article. Nobody has a clean answer.