So here’s a cautionary tale about lottery pools that needs telling. Lottery pools can be fun ways for bond-building between friends and coworkers, although the actual chances of winning remain extremely slim no matter how many people participate. But they don’t always go as planned, especially when big money is suddenly involved.
A group of six New Jersey construction workers decided they would pool their money together and play the lottery. Each chipped in $2.00 and they gave the money to one of the members of the group to buy and hold the tickets. These six people kept this ritual up for years. One day, a $77 Mega Millions jackpot was won by a New Jersey resident.
New Jersey is a state that does not require residents to identify themselves when they win the lottery. After the win, the man who was responsible for buying and holding the tickets suddenly stopped coming to work. Months went by, and the man showed up to work and told his boss he was quitting. Apparently, he told his boss that he had won the lottery, but he purchased the winning ticket with his own money – not with the money he and his coworkers pooled together.
This move didn’t sit well with the other 5 construction workers. They decided that this individual was cheating them, and they went so far as to take him to court. It turns out that the court ruled in favor of the 5 construction workers, and the lottery-winning construction worker was ordered to hand over $20 million to these gentlemen.
After taxes and court fees, each man ended up with just over $2 million. One of the men (who was also the group foreman) was asked why they didn’t take more strategic steps to insure things would be handled on the up-and-up if they won. He responded by simply saying, “we trusted him.”
A few things were done wrong here, which is why these people ended up in court. The main one was that copies of the tickets involved in the pool, along with copies of identifying numbers on the backs of the tickets were never made and given to each of the six members.
I’ve already written an article about Lottery Pools, so I won’t re-write that article here. But it’s not uncommon that when groups of people go into a lottery pool together, most times the necessary legal steps to protect everyone in the group are not taken. Part of the reason is that because the realistic chances of winning are so slim, most people simply won’t take the time necessary to put systems in place. Winning is just a fun dream that a group of people who have the same general struggle can share.
It’s also noted that money has the capacity to make people act in a way that their counterparts would never expect. Your good friend may prove to be not as good a friend as you thought if he or she is holding a ticket worth several millions of dollars in his or her hand, and he or she knows that you don’t know it.
I personally don’t do lottery pools just for this reason. Also, the fact that I am extremely greedy and don’t want to split $50 million with 100 other people. But I will say that if you are going to participate in a lottery pool, you really need to focus on treating the pool as if it was going to win. I don’t recommend simply trusting whomever you like the most in the group and letting him or her walk around with a potentially winning ticket.
If you don’t want to take it so seriously that you don’t want to go through the trouble of setting up rules and making copies of the tickets for everyone in the group, then my advice would be to just play the lottery on your own.