Saddest lottery stories?

Abraham Shakespeare Lotto death is one of the saddest lottery stories I have ever heard off. He was a poor ,illiterate, good man. He thought he found fortune when he found he won roughly 17 millions in the lottery. Instead of buying booze and drugs like so many other lottery winners did with their winnings, he used his winnings to help out his friends and family. He was alarmed that he was down to only about a million.

A snake in the grass named Dorinda "Dee Dee" Moore approached him and claimed she was a CPA or something like that and that she could save his last million for him. She even at one point in a videotaped interview is heard telling him he should move out of the country (This was later widely considered her planning to kill him and then cover it up with his "Moved to another country," schtick) He trusted her and she stole his million and shot him and buried his dead body on one of her propertys when he later on asked for his million back. She even had the audacity to offer to pay someone $50,000 to confess to Abraham's murder. The person wisely declined. Abraham's friend DID get Dee Dee to confess she knew where Abraham's body was by hiding a tape recording device in an innocent looking can of red bull. Genius! Her unwitting confession drove police to dug up her property where they found Abraham's dead body. It didn't take long for Dee Dee to be sentenced to life in prison after her trial. So sad that Abraham was killed over his million!

There was an episoide on a crime TV program about these events.

Greasy John, I saw the Abraham Shakespeare story on 20/20 on YouTube. I remember a poster commented something like, "When you win the lottery and some random woman you have never seen before comes out of nowhere and claims she will help you hold onto your last winnings, that is an alarming red flag! RUN!

I can't top that; other than the one I have mentioned before about the woman who lost $10 million of a $12 million jackpot because the clerk who sold her the ticket made a mistake (he punched up six tickets with the same numbers when she wanted only one; she declined to buy the other five, so, by store policy, the store "bought" them, and those were the only six winning tickets of the $12 million jackpot), the one that comes to mind is the time when California's scratch-off lottery had a poker-based game where, if you got five tickets with Jokers on them, you sent them in for a chance to spin the wheel for $3 million - but one man sent in tickets that included one with a Joker and a pair of Aces, and was told later that (a) Jokers were wild, and (b) in fact, a three of a kind that included a Joker was worth double the normal amount, which I think was $10,000 for three Aces in that game. IIRC, they let him sift through all of the envelopes that were sent in for about a half hour to see if he could find his.

Not quite a lottery story, but I'll relate it anyway as it is similar.

When I was a young teen, one snowy night some buddies and I had the bright idea to throw snowballs at passing cars on the highway.

We hit a new Mustang, and it turns out the guy was pissed; he determined to seek revenge, and did so by turning around at the next opportunity, then pulling over and chasing us.

He caught me, and administered a pretty good beating: fortunately I had heavy winter clothing on, and only injured my pride, but I was certainly physically shaken up.

Anyway, when I got home the first thing my mom did was to tell me she'd gotten a call from a radio station announcing that I'd won their contest, and as my prize I won two tickets to see "Four Jacks and a Jill" in concert.

That recent ass-kicking curbed my glee.

Never mind the sadness of a few hundred people who lose out on millions of dollars: Look out for the millions of poor people who lose out on hundreds of dollars.

http://www.businessinsider.com/lottery-is-a-tax-on-the-poor-2012-4?IR=T

Quote:

The people who can least afford it are throwing away on average 47 cents on the dollar every time they buy a ticket. And the government, which relies increasingly on the lottery for funding, goes out of its way to tell them it is a good idea.

How many hungry and deprived children can thank their parents for being lottery and scratch card addicts?

LOTTERY=A MUGS GAME

Tykisha lofton. She purchased a winning ticket with money earned babysitting. While at her boyfriend house the police raided it for drugs and found her ticket

She was not chargef with anything but they confiscated her winnings claiming it was purchased with drug money

She won in court but lost on appeal. The state got all the winnings

Through the course of lotteries in the last ten years, it's certain I'd say a billion in unclaimed WINNINGS wound up in the garbage cans. Ohio had 270 million in a ten year period. All that money redirected to someone who didn't deserve it. Sad.