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.

Australian truck driver Bill Morgan had a heart attack in 1999 and was clinically dead for 14 minutes. He woke from a 12-day coma with zero brain damage. To celebrate, he bought a scratch card and won a Toyota Corolla. A Melbourne TV crew asked him to re-enact the win on camera, so he bought a fresh card and scratched it live on air. He won $250,000. He used the money to marry the fiancée he had proposed to from the hospital bed.

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.

A Croatian music teacher survived a train plunging into a frozen river, a plane door blowing open mid-flight, a bus crash into a river, two separate car fires, being struck by a bus, and driving off a cliff. He walked away from all seven. Then in 2003, he won the Croatian national lottery. He gave most of the money 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.

A 20-year-old lottery winner was offered $1,000,000 in cash or $1,000 a week for life - and turned down the million. Did she make the right call?

Jerry Selbee, a retired convenience-store owner from Evart, Michigan, spotted a flaw in a state lottery in three minutes: on roll-down weeks, buying tickets in bulk produced a positive expected return. He and his wife Marge formed a syndicate, drove 900 miles to Massachusetts for every roll-down, and played for nine years. Their group grossed $26 million. All legal.