Lottery Facts

You're more likely to die in a car accident driving to buy a lottery ticket than you are to win the Powerball jackpot.

Around 85% of lottery jackpot winners continue working after their big win, with many staying in the same job.

An Australian man was declared dead for 14 minutes and lived unscathed. To celebrate, he bought a scratch card and won a car worth $27,000. For a news report, he was asked to re-enact winning the scratch card, so he bought another card and won a $250,000 jackpot.

In the U.S., about 1% of lottery prizes go unclaimed each year - totaling over $2 billion in forgotten winnings!

In 2005, a fortune cookie company correctly foretold lottery numbers, resulting in 110 winners and an investigation.

In 1992, an Australian gambling syndicate purchased the majority of combinations in a Virginia lottery. They won, turning their $5m investment into $27m winnings.

In 2013, a man named Frane Selak survived a train derailment, a plane door explosion, a bus crash, and four car wrecks. He then won the lottery, gave most of it away, and said he was finally happy.

Joan Ginther won the Texas lottery four times between 1993 and 2010, collecting $20.4 million. The odds of one person doing that by chance - roughly 1 in 18 septillion. Investigators later discovered she had a PhD in statistics from Stanford and had been studying scratch-off distribution patterns.