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Comment by bb2018 | Hacker News Reader

bb2018

A judge in NH recently ruled that the winner of the lottery doesn't need to come forward and be a part of lottery press and therefore their name does not need to be released. The reasoning is good on the surface that people who just won a life changing amount of money shouldn't have to have their personal details flashed on the news.

However, it seems like being named in public is the best way to prevent fraud. Many of these scams are through second counsins' friends and weird sources. Now an insider could just go through their best friend and no one would ever be able to connect the dots.

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That's not what the case in NH was about. It was already possible to collect the winnings through an anonymous trust, but the winner didn't know about that before signing their own name on the ticket. The ruling let the winner do what they could have done without issue, had they known about it sooner.

Depends which kinds of fraud you care about. Being named in public as a lottery winner is a pretty good way of making someone the target of every fraudster, con artist and swindler in the area.

Indeed. Anonymous collection protects the winner, public collection protects the game.

The fact that a member of a crime family felt comfortable enough to appear on a McDonald's commercial as a winner seems to call into question the effectiveness of this strategy.

Except that major jackpots are chosen using physical apparatus and much harder to hack. There are multiple sets of balls, chosen randomly, the balls are regularly weighed to the thousandth of an ounce (gram? Can't remember), the balls are never handled alone and the drawings are supervised by independent auditors.

I'm not sure if I'm for or against winners staying anonymous. If they would require public identification, winners could simply change their name to smith. I'd happily change my name for a hundred million dollars.

It's not quite that simple for some of the games. This one was able to slip in codes for some rather significant games: https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/investigations/...

He gave the tip to his brother. Being able to shield your identity would make fraud both more tempting and less likely to be caught.

The judge ruled that way because people who win lotteries tend to have a lot of life threatening bad luck after they win.

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