35-year-old arrested for stealing his roommate's winning $10 million lottery ticket

CNBC ^ | 01-09-2019 | Yoni Blumberg

[NRx]

If you win the lottery, experts say, you should keep as quiet as possible about it. A lottery winner from Vacaville, California, whose situation escalated to the point where the police had to get involved, just learned that lesson the hard way.

As Lt. Chris Polen of the Vacaville Police Department, who wrote a popular Facebook post about the story, tells CNBC Make It, "We've seen lottery schemes in the past, but nothing of this magnitude."

On Dec. 20, the lottery winner, whom we'll call LW since he has asked local authorities not to reveal his identity, went into a Lucky Supermarket and purchased a $30 scratch-off lottery ticket that he believed to be worth $10,000. LW went home and told his two roommates the good news.

But the next morning, when he took a trip to the Sacramento district office of the California State Lottery to collect his prize, lottery officials turned LW away, saying there was a problem with his ticket.

Later that week, Polen says, LW's 35-year-old roommate Adul Saosongyang went to the lottery office himself with the winning ticket in hand. That kicked off an investigation to confirm that Saosongyang was the actual winner, which is protocol when large prizes are at stake.

When the lottery investigators went to Lucky's to obtain video footage of the purchase, they were told the ticket may have been stolen. That's when they connected with the police.

[Tai_Chung]

Uh, so is it 10K, or 10M?

The difference is the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez taxes.

[MadMax, the Grinning Reaper]

California says it has a lot of safety features regarding the lottery and its tickets, but NONE for the big winner who wants to remain anonymous for THEIR SAFETY.

California - If anyone can get something ass-backwards, they can, and always do.

[marktwain]

I assumed (wrongly, as it turns out) that the prize was to be paid out in installments. The net present value of an installment prize would have been much less than the sum of the installments, of course.

Thanks for the research to get this right.

Your plan is a good one, but the odds are the winner will not follow it.

[marktwain]

One of the things I would do is move where it is really cheap to live.

I might consider moving to Panama, If I were him.

Banking privacy. Get a pretty and talented girlfriend to teach you Spanish.

Cost of living is pretty cheap.

[Lurkina.n.Learnin]

That 10 mil would be played over a period of 30 years. Cash value would be maybe 6 mil. Then the 37% from that.