If they can tell who robbed the gas station, why can't they tell who won the Lotto?

Surely a given state’s lottery administrator has the information regarding place/date/time that a winning ticket was purchased… so why do we never see grainy pictures on the news of who the Alleged Lotto Winner is? Do the gas station people at least look at their own recordings to see if they can figure out who it was?

Unless there was a dispute over ownership of the winning ticket, why would anyone care or bother trying to find a video of the purchase?

I’m certain they can, but why would they bother? It’s the responsibility of the winner(s) to claim their prize.

If no winners come forward after a year or so (it varies from state to state) the money either gets recycled back into the system or gets portioned out to various charities (again, it varies by state).

Local gossip / general noseyness. Why do people hack into celebrities’ medical records for that matter? I’m not attempting to justify this; I’m just surprised we haven’t seen more of it.

My guess is that they only store video footage for 24 hrs unless there’s reason to keep it. By the time the lotto number has been drawn, its been figured out what place sold the ticket and there’s been a long enough delay in someone claiming the prize that people start to get curious, the relevant footage has been destroyed.

A lot of people that do win wish to remain anonymous. People may not want to play if they know that if they win there’s going to be a surveilance video of them shown on the 10 o’clock news.

Of course the ticket buyer is not necessarily the same as the prize winner (since the ticket might have been purchased for someone else).

Well they are out of luck. Only a few states allow you to cash the tick anonymously. http://www.powerball.com/pb_contact.asp

For 95% of the country, no matter what you do, your name and city will be plastered all over the news once you cash the ticket. People can use a trust to claim the money to at least keep their name out of it but I don’t know how often that happens.

So I am not sure that anonymity would be much of a factor since most people aren’t going to get it.

I imagine more than one person would claim to be the ticket buyer. Certainly more people would want to claim to be a lotto winner than claim to be a robber.

Most people wouldn’t mind their pictures being taken for publicity if they won a big lottery. But they wouldn’t be too thrilled about seeing a security clip from when they dragged themselves to the 7-11 at three in the morning in their slippers to get some cough syrup so they could sleep, and might as well pick up a ticket while I’m here to see if ANYTHING can go my way today.

People DON’T want to be identified BEFORE they claimed the prize.

I certainly wouldn’t want to be killed for a little slip of paper, even if that paper is worth millions.

There’s probably a legal reason against revealing their identity, too. Criminals waive that part of their right to privacy by committing a crime, but until a lotto winner steps forward to claim their prize, their expectation of privacy has to be respected.

One such dispute happened in my hometown.

ETA: Another dispute occured when someone claimed that she just happened to play the winning numbers every week at the store that just happened to sell the winning ticket and just happened to drop the winning ticket in the store’s parking lot, where the person who claimed the jackpot must have just happened to pick it up.

Fortunately, the store’s security camera just happened to show the person who claimed the jackpot buying the winning ticket.

Because that’s not the point. Announcing that there is an unclaimed prize creates buzz and helps the lottery get some free advertising. The onus is on the winner to step forward, not for the lottery to go out and find them. An unclaimed prize is good for the state, whereas an unsolved robbery is bad.

If the place that sold the ticket is part of a chain, they probably have a corporate policy in place that prohibits releasing security footage to anyone except law enforcement.

All the more reason to always sign to back of the ticket right after you buy it. Sometimes, when it’s a mega-million dollar Powerball, I even scribble my SSN too!

The gas station I used to work at had tapes on a monthly loop (i.e - the tapes were numbered 1-31 and changed daily, before being reused the following month)

I sell lotto tickets, snd would certainly look at our video if a jackpot winner were sold by our store. We have store-level access to 30 days worth of digital video. I’d want to know if it were a regular customer.
Joe

Did the person have to prove the lady was a liar for some reason?

I’d be pretty POed at a store that, for any reason, decided to publish pictures of me shopping there. If it was something like me buying a winning lottery ticket, I’d be tempted to require that the store pay for the extra security measures that I suddenly found necessary to put on my house, in case someone decided to break in and steal the ticket from me. Now, once I decide to claim the ticket, then the onus is on me, to insure security.