Can lottery winners remain anonymous?
Being allowed to remain anonymous, regardless of which lottery you win, is the exception rather than the rule today in the United States.
Imagine winning a seriously big lottery. There’s no doubt that your life would change in a huge number of positive ways.
But along with your winnings comes a history of lottery winners who haven’t fared so well after their windfall. And even for those whose foibles haven’t caught the attention of people around the world, there may be some real benefits to being able to remain anonymous—at a minimum, some privacy and peace of mind.
Well not so fast. Being allowed to remain anonymous, regardless of which lottery you win, is the exception rather than the rule today in the United States.
When we dream of winning the lottery, if we think about remaining anonymous, we assume that the applicable law would be that of the state in which we reside. This isn’t actually true. Anonymity for lottery winners is determined by the state in which the winning ticket was sold. While that seems like a bit of a head-scratcher to us, it’s the law.
The 11 states that currently allow lottery winners to remain anonymous where a winning ticket was purchased in their state are: Arizona, Delaware, Georgia, Kansas, Maryland, New Jersey, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, Virginia and Texas.
In October 2018, a lottery ticket was purchased in South Carolina for the $1.54 billion Mega Millions jackpot. To this day, the winner of this historic prize has remained anonymous.
What we do know, over three years after the purchase of that lucky ticket, is that it was purchased in South Carolina by a South Carolina resident. Again, the winner could have chosen to remain anonymous no matter their legal state of residency since the ticket was purchased in South Carolina. The winner waited six months to come forward to lottery officials to claim their prize.
This jackpot remains the largest payout in history to a single winner in U.S. history. As is almost always the case in winning a large lottery, the winner can choose the full amount in an annuity paid out over many years or a cash payment. The South Carolina winner chose the one-time payment of nearly $880 million.
Parenthetically, the largest overall jackpot in U.S. history was a $1.585 billion Powerball draw in January 2016. Unlike the South Carolina win, this one was split between people in three states.
It’s not like our collective curiosity with lottery winners hasn’t produced some creative legal challenges. In the South Carolina case, the state’s Education Lottery CEO noted that their agency successfully fought off Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests dating back to 2013 seeking to identify winners’ personal information. The state had an anonymous group of people win a $400 million Powerball jackpot in September 2013, with the FOIA request to soon follow.
It’s not just the glossy magazine stories of people squandering their fortunes that motivates some winners to remain anonymous. As this Forbes piece from almost a decade ago points out, when the world knows you have won a big lottery, you essentially have a target on your back. Friends (as well as many brand-new ones) and family are drawn to your new wealth, but you are also a target for every scammer who can find even one piece of your personal information. Add a range of people looking to sue you for things you may have, but probably didn’t do, and this gives you a snapshot into the experience on many lottery winners who didn’t have the option of anonymity.
As lotteries aren’t going away anytime soon, more states may consider adopting anonymity rules that harm no one but may help keep the sanity and safety of winners who purchase lottery tickets in their state.
