A recent lottery winner doesn’t want anyone to know they won the lottery. The person who won the $50 million prize is trying to maintain their anonymity, and so far has been able to do so, though they haven’t received any of the money they are owed. It’s a legal fight now, and one that comes with the question of how much anonymity can someone expect to receive if they win the jackpot.
The people running the lottery have incentive to make winners public. In short, it shows that people have won, which is good for a couple reasons. One, it proves that the lottery winnings are going somewhere, to real people, it’s a bit of transparency to prove that the lottery is working as intended and the prizes are going to people who deserve them. Lottery commissions have had a constant fight to prove that everyone dealing with lottery winnings is on the up and up, which is of course why anyone who has ever gone into a convenience store has heard the irritating “woo-hoo” that accompanies a winning ticket. With great jackpots comes great responsibility.
The second reason is pure marketing, for every face they put behind a giant novelty cheque there’s the implication that someone else could be the next. It’s a business of selling fantasy, and the fantasy of winning untold riches is one that can drive people to buy tickets and keep buying. The release of the names of the winners is a way to remind people that if their friends and neighbors can get a pile of money for little effort, in theory so can they.
The winner doesn’t quite get a good angle from this, of course. There are countless stories of people whose lives were ruined after a giant cash windfall made a large pile of people want their own part of the payout. Some of this passes into the realm of urban legend, of course, as oral history has a tendency to inflate consequences and tweak the details, but everyone knowing you’ve got money in the bank is undoubtedly going to get you more attention than you would otherwise have.
It stands to reason that one wouldn’t want to risk having their face tied to such a big jackpot. That risk is increased in the case of this prize, as it was a jackpot that was unclaimed for a long period of time and as a result got a steady increase in the amount of attention as the search for a winner concluded. This also means that the lottery commission is equally determined to get a face to the jackpot winner, because if they are in a constant fight for credibility they do need to prove that the winner of a nearly unclaimed jackpot is a real person. This isn’t something that will be settled quietly as the stakes are quite high for both sides.
To be fair, we don’t know what will happen to our mystery winner, they might be more paranoid than is warranted. The announcement could come and go with no real consequences for their life, apart from a much fuller bank account. Still, everyone knowing that bank account is filled with millions of dollars could have people coming out of the woodwork trying to get their hands on it, any paranoia they may have is legitimate. But I actually side with the lottery commissions on this. Not for publicity reasons, but for transparency ones. The trust of the public is the only way a lottery can work, and that is compromised if you give cash to people in the shadows.
