lottery

The economic downturn has been rough on a lot of businesses, but it’s been a boon for state lotteries. Seems people who only have a few dollars to spare aren’t putting them away for a rainy day — they’re trying to parlay them into big bucks.

The odds of striking it rich in the lottery are remarkably small, but apparently it really helps if you’re a math genius. Several years ago, a group of students from the famed Massachusetts Institute of Technology cracked the lottery code that enabled them to win millions of dollars — and state officials did nothing to stop it.

A defective lottery ticket raised and then dashed an out-of-work man’s dreams. It was like a printing machine played a cruel trick on him.

Not one, not two, but six $1 million Powerball tickets were sold at the same QuikTrip gas station located in Glendale, Arizona. Only one person has come forward thus far to claim their ticket and therein lies the source of a difference of opinion between lottery officials and the owner of the establishment that sold the tickets.

The odds of picking winning lottery numbers are remarkably slim — let alone doing it twice with the exact same numbers. Yet that’s what happened to a Virginia woman who won a $1 million Powerball lottery twice on the same day.

Money may not buy happiness, but it just might buy you a whole heap of trouble. One Michigan lotto winner discovered that firsthand after she was arraigned on two felony counts of welfare fraud.

Getting to take home a giant check worth millions in lottery winnings might sound like a dream come true, but it can also be a nightmare. Now someone out there has won at least a share of $656 million and we don’t know who will get the dough. Perhaps there’s a good reason for that.

And here we go. Less than four days after the record Mega Millions drawing, we’re already heading toward our first lawsuit.