More money, more problems?
Federal authorities in New York said Tuesday that a winner of a $1.53 billion Mega Millions jackpot drawing in 2018 was one of several victims in a massive fraud orchestrated by a man hired to be a financial adviser.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York said in a presser that a self-dubbed “lottery lawyer” and several other co-defendants defrauded the anonymous South Carolina lottery winner out of tens of millions of dollars. The $1.53 billion Mega Millions jackpot was just shy of the $1.58 billion Powerball jackpot record set in 2016, but that ticket was split between winners in three states. The record-setting Mega Millions had just a single winning ticket and remains the largest of its kind in history.
The winner elected to go with the cash option of more than $877 million.