Do people really win 10, 100, 200 million dollars / euros / pounds in the lottery? I wonder.
If you were to tally all of the supposed annual lottery winnings in the United States or Europe for a given year, how much would they amount to in total? Would such a presumably huge amount of money even be sustainable? I searched for an answer on Google, but there wasn't a
single listing having to do with this question.
I've also searched for the following phrases: "Do people actually win the lottery?" and other variants such as "Does anyone really win the lottery?" / "Can you really win the lottery?" / "Has anybody really ever won the lottery?" / "Is the lottery fake?" - etc., and aside from a few scattered semi-related queries or posts, there seems to be a suspicious lack of blog and forum posts on the subject.
For example, if I search for "Is the lottery real?" - I get links to stories of people who have supposedly won the lottery.
Here's the scenario I imagine: The lottery cabal needs a new face for the newspapers to show off as a lottery winner. They conscript actors, or out-of-work federal agents, or anybody who will take payment to lie in front of the press. Maybe they pay them a million dollars to sign an iron-clad non-disclosure agreement that they will
never reveal the truth about how much they get to keep their mouth shut - the penalty for telling the truth being forfeiture of whatever real money they might have been given.
Or here's another scenario: Let's say someone wins 200 million dollars - like supposedly just happened to some couple on Long Island - the lottery mafia knocks on their door with its lawyers, tells them they'll be subject to extra taxes due to some anomaly in the way that they won; or maybe the wife is an illegal immigrant and the winnings are void because she bought the ticket, or maybe the husband has a criminal record or is wanted for something which he could be put in jail for, or any number of threats - so the lucky couple agrees to accept one or two million dollars instead of one or two hundred million dollars, but again must sign a non-disclosure agreement to not reveal the true amount they received.
Third scenario: Somebody actually wins once in a while; they release pictures of real people who have actually won; the lottery gestapo then assesses public gullibility and calculates the frequency of actual winnings needed to continue to prop up the system. Then the other 99% of the time the names of lottery "winners" are released as names only on page 14 of the newspaper.
What do you think?
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