Chris Schillig: Mega Millions winner, where are you?
My wife and I caught lottery fever last week.
It’s probably more accurate to say my wife caught lottery fever while I soothed her overheated brow with a cold compress. Figuratively speaking, that is.
We visited a local convenience store Friday night to buy Mega Millions tickets. We should have apologized to anybody in line behind us — and there were a few dozen — because Holly had lots of questions and she wasn’t shy about asking. Or about telling the cashier, and later, our server at a restaurant, how she was going to be the sole winner and how she planned to spend the money.
We ended up “investing” $15 into five tickets. We also set a new record by not matching even one winning number on any of them. The old Schillig luck running true to form.
In all honesty, that’s OK. I’m not sure I would know what to do with $780.5 million, which was the cash payout, anyway. Which isn’t to say that I wouldn’t be willing to find out.
What I’m less OK with is never finding out who really won. But since the winning ticket was sold in Illinois, that might be the case.
Illinois allows lottery winners of prizes larger than $250,000 to shield their identities from the public. Several other states have similar policies, including Ohio.
This makes sense, I guess. It’s a ridiculous amount of money to receive all at once, or in installments. Having the winner or winners announced publicly could open them to unwanted attention from unscrupulous people.
It sounds like the plot of a movie: A recent lottery winner’s family is kidnapped, and the kidnappers demand umpty-million, unaware that the figure is impossible because the winner has opted for a small percentage of the money every year.
I vaguely recall a Mel Gibson movie called “Ransom” with a kinda/sorta similar story, except Gibson’s character wasn’t a lottery winner. He became fantastically wealthy the old-fashioned way, which I assume was either through inherited wealth or taking advantage of corporate welfare … er, tax breaks.
A less outlandish problem for lottery winners would be the arrival of long-lost relatives and childhood friends. Or random strangers hitting up winners with sad stories, real or imaginary, or with can’t-lose investment opportunities.
So, yeah, Annono Lotto makes sense from that perspective.
Still, though, this means that taxpayers and lottery players have only the lottery’s word about who won and how it’s all paid out. Transparency with public dollars, this is not.
In New York, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo vetoed an anonymity proposal in 2019. Instead, he advised potential winners to form a limited liability company (LLC) to keep their names private. According to the New York Post, the tactic worked for 23 Long Island coworkers who took a lump-sum payout of around $262.2 million after winning Mega Millions three years ago. They called their LLC New Life 2019. If there’s a better name, I can’t think of one.
With an LLC, the public, including lottery players, can still birddog that the payout went somewhere other than back into the lottery coffers, and the winner or winners can still maintain privacy.
With last week’s drawing, all the public knows, at least for now, is that the winning ticket was sold at a Speedway gas station in Des Plaines.
And all I know is that a lottery winner in Illinois owes me $15. Plus the $99 it will cost for me to set up an LLC.
You know, to protect my privacy.
Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.
This article originally appeared on The Alliance Review: Chris Schillig: Mega Millions winner, where are you?
