How much did it cost him to buy up all the remaining twenty dollar tickets? Aren’t there dozens of them at each location?
Sometimes, sometimes not.
In this case I expect a lot of people were looking for that last big winner.
Say he averaged 10 tickets per store that would be $200 per store, 40 stores gives a total of $8,000 spent.
If this guy had $8,000 laying around he didn’t need the money just wanted it.
Persistence pays off.
As I understand scratch off games, only limited numbers of tickets are printed for each game. Winnings are published. A devout player could notice many retailers were out of tickets for that game and that the 5 million dollar one had still not been sold yet yet. Nothing nefarious about it.