Should you stay anonymous after winning the Lottery?

There are, of course, pros and cons as to whether you should stay anonymous after winning the lottery. A British couple who recently won the EuroMillions deemed it worthwhile to announce their new multi-millionaire status to the world. Was it the right decision? Perhaps time will tell.

The UK’s biggest ever jackpot winners!

Joe and Jess Thwaite from Gloucester scooped a mind-blowing £184 million EuroMillions jackpot just two months ago, May 10th, making them the biggest ever lottery winners from the UK and the second biggest EuroMillions jackpot winners.

Jess said she had “kind of been ready to win for years”, as her “dad played the National Lottery all his life and constantly dreamed of winning” and “would always ask us what we’d do when we won, how we’d spend it, who we’d treat”.
Despite her claim of feeling ready, Jess, along with husband Joe, who bought the ticket, still needed “one week to think” about coming forward, before being handed their cheque by TV presenter Dermot O’Leary at their lotto winner ceremony.

Although she admitted to feeling worried about the decision, Jess said: “I don’t want to lie to family and friends, I want to enjoy it with them.

“Maybe, naively, I thought we could tell a few people and it would be fine. But the list gets longer and soon you realise it would be a burden asking them to keep it quiet. Telling people makes it easier”, she explained.

A similar sentiment to that of the Thwaites was shared by fellow EuroMillions winners Colin and Chris Weir from Largs, Ayrshire, who in 2011, won what remains the 10th biggest ever EuroMillions jackpot win, £161 million.

“We wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the experience if we had constructed lies to tell our nearest and dearest”, said Chris.

No pressure to go public in the UK

Lottery winners in the UK have the right to remain anonymous and it’s no surprise that out of the 10 biggest EuroMillions winners in the UK, only four have gone public. Contrary to popular belief, lottery winners do not receive extra money for going public, as if a ‘few bob’ extra would make a big difference to someone who’s just won £100 million.

According to lottery operator Camelot: “The decision to share their news or remain anonymous is completely up to the winner and depends on a number of factors including who they’ve told and what they plan to do with their win.

"It’s fantastic when winners share their news, but everyone is different. Ultimately it is up to the individual and we’ll support them whatever their decision."

Land of the free? Not when it comes to the lottery

Apart from the fact that lottery wins in the US are heavily taxed at the federal, and sometimes state level, only 11 states allow lottery winners to remain anonymous, these are Delaware, Kansas, Maryland, North Dakota, Texas, Ohio, South Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, New Jersey and Virginia.

Lottery operators and state governments alike prefer winners to go public for a variety of reasons. Obviously, it’s great publicity. Putting a face to the jackpot makes winning the lottery seem like a reality. Seeing an ordinary person win the lottery can inspire others to play. Given that lottery sales and taxes are put towards state run projects and/or charitable causes, it gives transparency to the public that someone has actually won.

Although lottery fraud is rare, having a winner come out in public can avoid cases of fraud such as the Hot Lotto fraud scandal which came to light in 2017 after the former security director of the Multi-State Lottery Association, Eddie Tipton, confessed to rigging a random number generator to win millions of dollars.

While it may be great for the lottery operators and the government for lottery winners to go public, why do those who are not obliged to do so, opt to come forward? Whether it’s across the pond or here in Blighty, the reasons are generally the same.
Why go public?

The fame factor cannot be disregarded. There’s no doubt that some lottery winners go public because they want the attention. Even if they claim otherwise.
It’s human nature to want to feel important, to gain attention. Some people crave the limelight, others may want to show up those who once put them down for previously having less than them.

However, most lottery winners who go public claim to do so because they don’t want the stress of having to keep a secret. They prefer to be open about things so that they can share their wealth with the family and friends and go about life without anything to hide.

Lotto winner Julie Jeffrey from Watford, who won £1 million back in 2001, said that she and her husband Chris had gone public because “there is nowhere to hide”.

As the Thwaites and the Weirs explained, some lottery winners feel that it would be impossible for them to keep the news of their fortune a secret forever, so it’s better to accept the inevitable and get things done as soon as possible.
Mavis Wanczyk from Massachusetts certainly wasted no time in getting things done. Mavis came forward just a day after winning a mind-blowing $758.7 million (£636.7 million) Powerball jackpot. “I just wanted to do this, I wanted to just get it over, done with and then everybody will just leave me alone”, said the 53-year-old.
However, police had to boost patrols around Wancyks residence in the days following the win and Wanczyk’s name was used in a widely circulated social media scam. An example of some of the issues faced by lottery winners who go public.

Public perils

Over the years there have been plenty of horror stories of winners who have gone public, the so called “lottery curse”.
From divorces, to going bankrupt, to death threats, lottery winners have faced it all.
The first dilemma which lottery winners face when they go public is usually having to deal with their family and friends, deciding who they’ll help out. The classic scenario is when all the long-lost cousins and school friends start coming out of the woodwork looking for handouts.

In the most extreme cases, lottery winners have even been murdered. This was the sad case of Abraham Shakespeare from Florida who won $30 million (£25.2 million) on the Florida Lottery in 2006, receiving a $17 million (£14.3 million) lump-sum. Shakespeare had expressed his disillusionment after winning the lottery, telling a close friend that he would have “been better off broke” and that he “thought all these people where (his) friends, but then (he) realised tall they want is just money”. One of those people was Dorice Donegan “Dee Dee” Moore who was convicted of first-degree murder for the killing of Shakespeare and had swindled millions off Shakespeare after setting up a business with him, which she controlled the funds for.

Apart from fake friends and family, members of the public also try and reach out to lottery winners through social media, emails, letters or anyway possible, to make their pleas.
Then there’s the ever-looming presence of the tabloids as lottery winner stories are always popular.

The online option

Another way to avoid going public is by betting on the Lottoland online lottery.
With Lottoland, you can bet on the outcome of international lotteries such as PowerBall and MegaMillions, with the chance to win the biggest lottery jackpots in the world, all from the comfort of your home in the UK. All you need is a mobile device and an internet connection, and you can have a world of lottos at your fingertips.
Lottoland holds a Guinesss World Record for the largest online gambling payout, a whopping €90 million!  Whilst some Lottoland winners have gone public, the record winner chose to go anonymous, but it was revealed that she was a 36-year old cleaner from Berlin who placed a bet on the EuroJackpot lottery.

Is it worth it?
Whilst it may be difficult to keep your win entirely a secret, there have been cases of lottery winners who have managed to keep their wins a secret, even from their immediate family, including their spouses. They have managed to do this by keeping a very low profile and gradually spending the money, “rewarding” their family from time to time and putting the extra funds down to bonuses or pay-rises. The main reason for doing this would be as a way to “protect” their family and not let the money ruin anyone’s life or radically changing things. Understandably, most people would prefer to enjoy their winnings without having to take this approach.

Even if you told just a select few people about your win, the news would likely spread out to your whole family and eventually to your work colleagues. At least you could still maintain a lower profile than having your name printed in every newspaper and all over the internet, enabling anyone to learn of your source of wealth through Google.

Although there may be an argument for speeding things up by going public and facing the issue head on, the pressure of having the entire nation knowing that you’re a millionaire, can be a heavy burden for some winners.

Sometimes, lottery winners can feel as if they don’t belong either amongst regular people or amongst other millionaires, especially when other wealthy people find out that they are lottery winners. Just as “new money” is shunned by the aristocracy, “lotto money” is often shunned in upper class society. Therefore, the less people know about your source of wealth, the less chance of being judged or looked down on at the country club.
Of course, not all lottery winners are bothered about being accepted into elitist circles, but the issue of not being able to please everyone can be tough on some winners. Even though they’re jackpot winners, according to Psychotherapist Caron Burruw, “sometimes there is no winning” with regards to how lottery winners can cope with the pressure of revealing themselves.

“Often if they have kept it a secret people resent it, yet if they do tell they’re seen as changed and different anyway”, Barruw adds.

At the end of the day it comes down to the individual or the couple’s own decision, each case is unique but the best approach would be to do whatever you feel is best. If you go public, you need to deal with the consequences, probably the wisest thing to do would be to keep a low profile after coming forward, this way, you don’t have to worry about keeping a secret, but it would be best to avoid problems by keeping out of the public eye.

Lottery winners are usually advised to delete all social media accounts and stay out of the limelight.
If you do remain anonymous and don’t want to arouse suspicion, a sound approach would be to take some time before claiming the prize, wait for the media hype to die down before you cash in. Stay in your job for some time until you can come up with a good plan of how to ride off into the sunset without giving your secret away.