Charlotte McDonald
speaker
483 appearances
11 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2012
last heard 11 Jun
Charlotte McDonald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
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.
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.
Some multiple winners have turned out to be store cashiers ripping off unsuspecting customers.
This was a concern in Florida, where the authorities brought in new rules for stores.
Here's Jeff from the Palm Beach Post again.
Another way in which shop workers have cheated is by checking the scratch cards before they're sold.
That's all we have time for this week.
Thanks to Lawrence Mower, Geoff Kelly-Lewenstein, Philip Stark and Daniel Simmons-Ritchie.
If you want to get in touch, email us at moreorless at bbc.co.uk or tweet us at BBC More or Less.
And now here's a word about one of our other podcasts from the BBC World Service.
That's Ocean Stories, a brand new four-part miniseries from The Compass podcast.
Showing 421–440 of 483 · page 22 of 25
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