Once again human greed and stupidity knows no bounds.
The way to prevent this is to photocopy all the pool tickets and distribute to participants before buying your own.
This is all over the news here in Baltimore. Her story is full of holes. She claims to have the winning ticket, but can’t prove it, and at one point even said she “thought” she had picked the winning numbers, but wasn’t sure how to check to be sure.
There’s also some question as to whether she’s a legal citizen.
And now there is legal precedent against her. No way she gets to keep all of it, the bitch.
It’s such a jerkwad thing to do. It’s $105 MILLION dollars. She could throw them each a couple millions and they’d have no reason to complain, and she’d still have so much money left over.
I’m not understanding this story.
How does a lottery pool work? Does one person collect all the money and then buy a bunch of tickets? Or is everyone buying tickets for the pool?
I can easily see someone buying lottery tickets at work in a pool. Then buying some privately at home. A lot of people buy a lotto ticket anytime they are in a convenience store for gas or milk.
Somebody at the office pool should have a record of the tickets bought in the pool.
When we did office pools, everyone would kick in a set amount, then one person would take that money and buy the tickets, photocopy them, and give everyone a copy. Those were the pool numbers. Anything you bought apart from those were yours.
Stories like this make me think of something my mom was fond of saying:
“God shows his contempt for money by the people he gives it to”
Petty selfishness in the face of a scrillion dollar windfall is just unseemly.
Why is this even an issue?
“God shows his contempt for money by the people he gives it to”
I love that!!
Dude, this is the SDMB… it’s what we do!
That’s what I thought would be done.
So is this lady in the story the one person that bought the tickets? If so, I can understand the rage if she tried to claim the winning one. But photocopies of the pool tickets would make this scheme impossible.
Yet another reason that I hate it when offices I work in do ticket pools. Either you don’t put money in and they win and you’re a chump, or you do put money in and they win and you’re a chump. Just leave me out of all the drama.
If you don’t make copies of the pool tickets, you are out of luck. This sort of thing has been litigated before. One time, as I recall, it was a mother cutting out her daughter (or the other way around.)
Based on this, I’d say its a legal mess. They have to figure out which tickets she bought for the office with that last $5. Then see if the winning ticket is in that list.
Taking office pool tickets home was just… stupid.
Yeah, but if you don’t put money in and they win, you’re an even bigger chump when you’re stuck doing all the work and training the new employees after all the winners quit!
According to MSNBC,the woman is claiming that her coworkers all received copies of the tickets that were purchased as part of the pool:
If this is accurate, then her coworkers are idiots.
They interviewed this woman on the news last night. The reported asked “How do you know your ticket was separate?” and she said “caus e’ebody hus dey phouto-copy.” She showed a bunch of photocopies, but the reporter said he “couldn’t make out” the numbers. That shouldn’t work against her, though, as it’s not on her to prove the coworkers don’t have the ticket; it’s on them to prove they do.
Of course, I think the woman is lying, period. I don’t think she’s the winner at all, let alone splitting it with anyone.
The local talking heads have said you have to be a citizen to claim the prize. I don’t know if this is true or not.
Stories like this will eventually lead to a informal ban of office lotto pools.
If I was a manager of a store or company I wouldn’t want my name dragged through the mud. “McDonalds Lotto winner steals winning ticket” isn’t a great headline for McDonalds. I can already see the memos going out within the entire McDonalds organization banning this in the future.