Lottery Winners Who Lost It All: How Jackpot Dreams Turned Into Nightmares

Lottery Winners Who Lost It All: How Jackpot Dreams Turned Into Nightmares

By Mark Abadi, Lauren Frias, Kelsey Vlamis, Erin Snodgrass, Katie Balevic, Hannah Getahun, and Katherine Li

FINANCE  Business Inside

While it may be tempting, buying a lottery ticket is almost certainly not worth it.

And even if it does pan out, winning the lottery does not solve all of life's problems.

There are many examples of winners whose lives took a turn for the worse after hitting the jackpot.

Even if you beat the colossal odds of winning the lottery, it might not work out the way you expect.

There are plenty of examples of lottery winners — including some who won tens of millions of dollars — ending up exactly where they started, or worse.

Two of the biggest lotteries in the United States are Powerball and Mega Millions. The odds of winning Powerball are about one in 292 million, while the odds of winning Mega Millions are about one in 290 million.

The largest-ever lottery jackpot was $2.04 billion in the 2022 Powerball drawing. The winner was later identified as Edwin Castro, who bought his winning ticket in Altadena, California.

The second-largest was pulled this year on September 6, when two tickets, one sold in Missouri and the other in Texas, had the winning numbers for a nearly $1.8 billion jackpot. Powerball said if the winners opted for cash payouts, they would receive about $410 million each before taxes.

The drawing marked the sixth time in Powerball's 33-year history that the prize climbed past $1 billion.

For these previous lottery winners, snagging the jackpot didn't change their lives for the better.

Lara and Roger Griffiths bought their dream home — and then life fell apart.

Before they won a $2.76 million lottery jackpot in 2005, Lara and Roger Griffiths, of England, reportedly never argued.

Then they won and bought a million-dollar barn-converted house and a Porsche, not to mention luxurious trips to Dubai, Monaco, and New York City.

Media stories say their fortune ended in 2010 when a freak fire gutted their house, which was underinsured, forcing them to shell out for repairs and seven months of temporary accommodations.

Shortly after, there were claims that Roger drove away in the Porsche after Lara confronted him over emails suggesting that he was interested in another woman. That ended their 14-year marriage.

Bud Post lost $16.2 million, and his own brother put out a hit on him, his obituary said.

William "Bud" Post won $16.2 million in the Pennsylvania lottery in 1988, but he was $1 million in debt within a year.

"I wish it never happened," Post said. "It was totally a nightmare."

A former girlfriend successfully sued him for a third of his winnings, and his brother was arrested and later convicted, according to Post's obituary in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, for hiring a hit man to kill him and his then-wife in the hopes he'd inherit a share of the winnings.

After sinking money into family businesses, Post sank into debt and spent time in jail for firing a gun over the head of a bill collector.

"I was much happier when I was broke," he said, The Washington Post reported.

Bud lived quietly on $450 a month and food stamps until his death in 2006.

Martyn and Kay Tott won a $5 million jackpot but lost the ticket.

Martyn Tott, 33, and his 24-year-old wife Kay, from the UK, missed out on what would have been $5 million lottery fortune after losing their ticket.

A seven-week investigation by Camelot Group, the company that runs the UK's national lottery, convinced officials that their claim to the winning ticket was legitimate. But since there is a 30-day time limit on reporting lost tickets, the company was not required to pay up, and the jackpot became the largest unclaimed amount since the lottery began in 1994.

"Thinking you're going to have all that money is really liberating. Having it taken away has the opposite effect," Kay Tott told The Daily Mail. "It drains the life from you and puts a terrible strain on your marriage. It was the cruelest torture imaginable."

The couple's marriage eventually fell apart.

Sharon Tirabassi won $10 million Canadian but eventually returned to her old life.

In 2004, Sharon Tirabassi, a single mother who had been on welfare, cashed a check from the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. for more than $10 million Canadian.

She spent her winnings on a "big house, fancy cars, designer clothes, lavish parties, exotic trips, handouts to family, loans to friends," and in less than a decade she was back "riding the bus, working part-time, and living in a rented house."

"All of that other stuff was fun in the beginning, now it's like, back to life," she told The Hamilton Spectator.

Luckily, Tirabassi put some of her windfall in trusts for her six children, who would be able to claim the money when they turned 26.

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