Me and a friend went, he was getting his aunt and uncle's daily,
four daily three tickets.
And I'm like, let me get $20 out of the ATM, and
I got a mega powerball and use the rest the change for scratch offs.
I'm looking at the ticket and I'm like, go across the screen.
So I'm like and my friend Erica's next to me, and she's like, no and I was like.
Yelled through the whole shop and everybody came running.
It was literally a three second excitement and then it was just like,
this is too good to be true.
>> Speaker 3: So that is Christy Davis, who is a Michigan resident who won
the $70 million jackpot back in 2020.
Now, she didn't want to become a public figure.
She wanted to conceal her identity, but
she was forced to pay that price in order to get her reward, her winning.
So now she's fighting for future lottery winners to be able to remain anonymous.
So some details about that.
In 2020, Waterford resident Christy Davis went from living paycheck to
paycheck to matching all five numbers,
plus the powerball to win a $70 million powerball jackpot.
So, as we all know, you got to pay taxes on that.
So she opted to collect the one time lump sum payment
of about $36 million after taxes, nothing to sneeze.
[LAUGH] But the catch was, with winning that amount of money,
they needed her name to become public knowledge, which she didn't want to do.
In fact, she hired an attorney.
She had this to say about it.
We tried to get a lawyer to see if I can claim anonymously, and they said no.
That was my big thing, I didn't want to go on TV.
I know so many who've been through so much in life,
and it was either that or no money.
The Multi-State Lottery Association, which runs the powerball,
explicitly states that if you purchase a winning lottery ticket
in the following 11 states, you have the legal right to remain anonymous.
Arizona, Delaware, Georgia, Kansas,
Maryland, New Jersey, North Dakota,
Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia.
But so, for all the remaining states, and the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and
the US, Virgin islands, they require the lottery winners to publicly come forward
to claim their cash prize.
Now, every state has different laws on whether or not you can remain anonymous,
as well as other conditions associated with winning.
In Michigan, though, where Christy is from,
state law says that lottery players who win more than ten k in local in state
games are allowed to claim their prizes without revealing their name.
But she didn't win a local in state game, she won mega millions,
which is a multi-state game, and they cannot remain anonymous.
And Vox reported on this, and they wrote,
winners must sign the back of the ticket to officially claim it.
Then contact their state's lottery commission,
which announces the lottery is closed, by saying who won.
This means that often a winner's name, hometown,
and prize amount are easily available to anyone who's interested.
A scary prospect, given that, as Amy B Wang writes for WaPo,
lottery winners are famously susceptible to becoming targets for
everything from extortion to blackmail and even kidnapping.
So there's a lot of reasons why someone wouldn't want to remain anonymous when
they win the lottery.
In many states, lottery winners are a matter of public record.
So even if your win isn't promoted by the state lottery, it is readily available for
anyone who wants to look it up,
including people who have ill intent in looking it up.
Now, a character who you might know, Chris Christie,
while he was governor of New Jersey, actually vetoed a bill that would have
allowed New Jersey winners to remain anonymous.
He claimed that it would undermine the transparency that provides taxpayers
confidence in the integrity of the lottery, is what he said.
And that's not the only argument against it.
The other common argument against privacy, which Christie also mentioned, is sales.
Stores where winning tickets were bought can see massive bumps in sales afterward.
If the information isn't publicized, the excitement floats into the ether, and
ticket sales could slump, literally capitalizing on people's ignorance.
The likelihood of that store selling another winning ticket is next to none,
but it does increase ticket sales at those locations.
But the reason why Christy Davis is spearheading this is because after she was
forced to go public with the information.
Her identity was being used without her consent in local Facebook groups to scam
people.
She said, this I've seen in the Waterford Matters Facebook group a post,
this is Christy Davis, and I'm giving away blah, blah, blah, blah.
Send me this info to this phone number.
Comments on the post are like, they cleaned my bank account out.
Why would you give somebody your bank account information?
And then I have friends on there replying, that's not her saying,
I'm not on social media, and I changed my name.
She continued, on the lottery, people need to know when they expose your name.
This is the stuff that happens.
The lottery even emailed me, we heard you're out here scamming people.
I said, that's what happens when you expose people's names.
I'm not scamming anybody, I have money.
Why would I want to hack into someone's bank account and
take their money when they probably have $200 in their bank account?
Just leave me alone.
First of all, it's an awesome argument to be like,
I don't need these broke bitches money, okay?
I literally won the lottery.
[LAUGH] But I think it's a sound argument that she's making.
I mean, people, because her name is readily available,
public information are scamming off of it.
And as we highlighted earlier,
horrible things happen to people who win the lottery.
Of course, there's all these stories about them blowing their money, but
that's not the only thing that can happen, people take advantage of them.
People who have won the lottery have been kidnapped.
So I think that the arguments from the pro putting their names out their
side aren't nearly as strong as the arguments for protecting them.
Not that I'm ever gonna win the lottery, but
in the off chance that I do would be surprising because I don't play it, but
in the off chance I do, I would like to be able to remain anonymous.
I don't know, what do you guys right?
>> Speaker 4: Why would you say something like that?
You're putting it out in the ether.
You could have had a good chance and now you just ruined it.
But here's the only answer to this question.
If it is the case that in Arizona, Delaware, Georgia, Kansas, and
a handful of other states you can remain anonymous,
then you can remain anonymous in other states.
They should make that the law.
There is no reason that we need to divulge the name of the winner.
All it's doing is opening that person up for a lot of horrible crap, period.
Jordan, I know you disagree and
you want people to get scammed all the time, but your move.
>> To go back to the justification that the stores, without releasing these names,
wouldn't be able to publicize that's totally.
They already do, you see it time after time.
You can go to any convenience store $5,000 tickets sold here,
$10,000 tickets sold here.
I can see that there is a winner that was sold here that doesn't have someone's name
and picture on it.
I don't need that.
But it goes beyond just like targeting for scams, kidnapping.
The Daily Beast did a story last year when there was
a big powerball jackpot and somebody had been killed.
Because he had been such a target for
all of these different scams that somebody ended up getting into his life.
Took all of his money, said she was going to write a book about him,
ended up shooting him twice, burying him in his backyard,
and then just went on living her life with his money.
So many people in this piece.
People should check it out.
There's just all of these different accounts of things that have gone bad for
these winners and multiple instances of people saying,
I wish I never would have won.
Just let them live in peace good for them.
Jealousy, I'm sure, is a factor in a lot of this and
it makes people do really insane things.
There's no reason we don't need their names.
Who cares?
>> Speaker 3: And Bret, it was really messed up of you to kill that lottery
winner and I think that this is the right time to address that.
>> Speaker 4: Sorry, I got very mixed up.
I was trying to congratulate them but I just love too hard.
I love the argument.
It's like, listen, for this 500 million dollar jackpot,
we're going to need a little bit more incentive for people to buy tickets.
What are you talking about?
And also, the location gets a bonus anyway for any giant lottery purchase, so
that's probably going to outweigh the bump in tickets.
And the last point is there is a place east of the 405 somewhere in Hawthorne,
California, that has sold multiple multimillion dollar tickets.
So jokes on you, Ray.
>> Speaker 3: [LAUGH] I've been so owned.
[LAUGH] My mom always she'll call me and she'll be like, Ray,
I bought my Powerball ticket to pay off your law school debt.
And I'm like, don't play with me like that, mom, okay?
This debt is crushing me every day.
I wake up with the weight of $100,000 in student loan yet.
All right, we're not going to play about this.
[LAUGH] You're not winning the damn lottery.
Mom, don't give my hopes up.
But I should tell her to go to that convenience store that sold multiple
tickets.
Maybe your chances will go up.