Towards the end of last year, the massive US lottery PowerBall just continued to get bigger and bigger, rolling over for three whole months. The PowerBall is a notoriously high-paying lottery, having a hefty seed even before rollovers up the jackpot. In November, the wait was finally over.
Three months of rollovers led to a jackpot of $2.04 billion, which, quite remarkably, was won by a single ticket holder. While the record-winning player didn’t opt for the payment plan that would give him the full record sum, it was still a remarkable amount given the green light to flow into their bank account.
Record win quickly followed by another massive PowerBall
Deciding not to remain anonymous, Edwin Castro from California came forward with the winning ticket to lay claim to the massive $2 billion jackpot. PowerBall held a ceremony to celebrate its record winner, but he chose not to attend the event in person – the state requires him to be named as the winner, though. With the choice of getting the whole amount over 29 years in installments or less than half immediately, the record winner decided to half his haul.
The lump sum was paid out, giving Edwin Castro an additional $997.6 million in the bank. He made national news for landing the colossal win after a quarter of a year of rollovers, with it all coming from a $2 ticket. A mere eight days before Castro was officially cemented as the record winner, Washington state was declared as the home of PowerBall’s fifth-largest winner, with one lucky ticketholder landing a hefty $754.6 million jackpot.
Shortly after the record PowerBall win, the famed Christmas lottery in Spain, El Gordo, offered up a huge pot of €2.5 billion. This is a record-setting total amount, but the pot invariably gets split between several ticket holders, with a tier system in place for win amounts. Winners still get hefty sums, but the system certainly doesn’t rival the single-ticket potential of the PowerBall. At the time of writing, it had already grown beyond $200 million again.
The bulk of lottery ticket play is still physical tickets
An element that continues to hold true across many of the massive lottery win stories is that people claim their prizes with a real physical ticket. Fairly recent news stories, such as that of Newsweek, have indicated that only around 30 percent of people buy tickets online. Given the additional security and uncontested nature of digital tickets provided by buying online, though, it seems odd that more big winners don’t do so through websites and mobile apps.
That said, there is an arm of lottery gambling that has embraced the digital landscape. When you play the lottery online at Lottoland, rather than buying digital lottery tickets for the likes of MegaMillions, El Gordo, PowerBall, or the EuroJackpot, you’re betting on what numbers will show. As the platform operates an insurance model, it pays the smaller wins from the sales revenue and then leverages the model to accumulate high jackpot amounts for winners. There are still jackpots and number guessing but done differently and online.
If you’re fixed on getting hardcopy, paper lottery tickets, you can still leverage common tech to secure your purchase. For a start, make copies of your ticket. You could copy and print additional ones, take photos to your phone if the images have a setting that allows for a time stamp, or scan them to your computer directly.
Those PowerBall jackpots keep on climbing rapidly and to massive sums, so if you’re looking to play, be sure to take digital precautions to ensure an easy path to any potential win.