The Lottery Curse: Winners Who Lost Everything

🕑 10 min read

Last updated: June 2026

Everybody dreams of winning the lottery. Almost nobody dreams about what comes after, and that’s the part that should scare you. There’s a thing people call the lottery curse, and it’s real enough to fill a graveyard: winners who hit hundreds of millions and ended up bankrupt, robbed, ruined, even murdered. I’ve watched sudden money do the same thing on a casino floor my whole life. Let me tell you the true stories, and why a giant jackpot is more dangerous than it looks.

I want to be careful here, because this isn’t about sneering at people who got unlucky with good luck. These are real lives, and most of them were ordinary folks who got handed something no ordinary person is built to handle. But the pattern is so strong, and so repeatable, that it teaches the single most important lesson in all of gambling. So let’s go through it with respect, and with our eyes open.

What the lottery curse really is

The “lottery curse” is the name people give to a strange and well-documented fact: a shocking number of big jackpot winners end up worse off than before they won. Not a little worse. Bankrupt, divorced, estranged from family, sometimes dead. There’s a widely repeated claim that a large share of major winners hit serious money trouble within a few years, and while the exact percentage is argued over, the trail of ruined winners behind it is very real.

Here’s the thing, though. There’s nothing supernatural about it. A lottery ticket doesn’t carry a hex. What it carries is a sudden, enormous pile of money dropped on a person who has no training in handling it, surrounded by people who suddenly want a piece. That combination has a body count, and once you see the stories, you’ll understand it isn’t bad luck at all. It’s human nature meeting a number with too many zeros.

Jack Whittaker and the 314 million dollar nightmare

If the lottery curse has a face, it’s Jack Whittaker. In 2002, this West Virginia businessman won a Powerball jackpot of nearly 315 million dollars, taking a lump sum of well over a hundred million. He was already a successful man, not some naive kid, and he started out generous, giving piles of it to his church and his community. For a moment it looked like the rare happy ending.

Then the curse arrived. Thieves stole more than five hundred thousand dollars in cash from his car, parked outside a strip club. He was hit with hundreds of lawsuits. But the real horror wasn’t the money. His beloved teenage granddaughter, whom he’d showered with cash, died of a drug overdose. His daughter died too. His marriage fell apart. By the end, this man who had won a third of a billion dollars said, in plain words, that he wished he had torn the ticket up. He’d have given it all back to have his family whole. That’s the lottery curse in one sentence, from the man who lived it.

The man murdered for his jackpot

Jack Whittaker’s story is heartbreaking. Abraham Shakespeare’s is worse, because his curse came in human form. In 2006, Shakespeare, a Florida laborer who could barely read, won thirty million dollars. Money he never asked for changed everything, and not long after, a woman named Dorice Moore inserted herself into his life, claiming she wanted to write a book about how everyone was trying to take his fortune.

What she actually wanted was the fortune. She drained his accounts, and when the money and the questions got dangerous, she murdered him, and buried his body under a concrete slab behind a house. He was missing for months before he was found. Moore was convicted of first-degree murder and sent to prison for life. A man won a fortune most of us only fantasize about, and it got him killed and dumped in the ground. There is no clearer warning in the whole sorry catalog.

The pattern that keeps repeating

Once you start looking, the same story plays out over and over. William Post won sixteen million dollars in Pennsylvania in the late eighties. Within a year he was half a million in debt. His own brother hired a hitman to try to kill him and his wife, hoping to inherit. He ended up bankrupt, living on a small monthly government check, and said flatly that he’d been happier broke.

Then there’s Evelyn Adams, who didn’t just win the New Jersey lottery once, she won it twice, for millions. She gambled and gave the whole lot away and ended up, by her own account, living in a trailer. Across the ocean, a young British man won nearly ten million pounds at nineteen, became a tabloid joke for blowing it on cars and parties and worse, and was reportedly broke and looking for work within a decade. Different countries, different decades, different amounts. Same ending. That’s not a run of bad luck. That’s a law of nature.

Why sudden money destroys people

So why does it keep happening? A few reasons, and they stack up fast. The first is that nobody teaches you to handle a fortune, because almost nobody ever has one. A person who has managed a normal paycheck their whole life is suddenly steering a hundred million, and the skills simply aren’t there. The money goes out the door on houses, cars, and gifts faster than anyone imagined possible.

The second is other people. The moment a win goes public, the winner is swarmed: relatives with their hands out, old friends with sob stories, strangers with investment schemes, and outright predators like the ones who killed Abraham Shakespeare. Saying no to all of them is exhausting and lonely, and many winners can’t. The third reason is the simplest and the one I know best. Big money makes people gamble bigger, spend bigger, and assume the good times will never end. They quit their jobs, lose their routines and their purpose, and the structure that kept their life sane disappears overnight. Strip away skill, add a crowd of takers, and remove every guardrail, and ruin isn’t a curse. It’s just math.

How not to get cursed

Here’s the good news. The lottery curse is beatable, and the winners who survive intact all do roughly the same handful of things. First, tell almost no one. If your state lets you claim anonymously, do it, and if it doesn’t, lawyer up before you collect. Quiet winners get to keep their lives. Second, before you spend a dollar, hire real professionals, a fee-only financial adviser, a tax accountant, and an attorney, people paid to protect you, not to be your new best friend.

Third, take the annuity if you can stand to. Yearly payments over decades are clumsier than one giant check, but they’re a seatbelt: you literally cannot blow it all at once, and a bad year doesn’t wipe you out. Fourth, don’t burn your whole life down on day one. Keep your house, keep some routine, maybe keep working a while, because purpose is the thing money can’t buy and losing it is half of what breaks these winners. And the deepest lesson, the one that ties the lottery to everything we talk about here: treat any windfall, a jackpot, a hot streak, a lucky bet, as a fragile gift to protect, not a faucet that will run forever. The people in these stories forgot that. Don’t be one of them.

Frequently asked questions

Is the lottery curse real?

There’s nothing supernatural about it, but the pattern is very real and well documented. A large number of big jackpot winners end up bankrupt, estranged from family, or worse within a few years. The cause isn’t bad luck, it’s sudden wealth landing on people with no training to handle it, surrounded by others who want a share.

What happened to Jack Whittaker?

He won a Powerball jackpot of nearly 315 million dollars in 2002, then suffered theft, hundreds of lawsuits, and the deaths of his granddaughter and daughter, and the collapse of his marriage. He later said he wished he had torn up the ticket. His story is the most famous example of the lottery curse.

Did someone really get murdered over a lottery win?

Yes. Abraham Shakespeare won thirty million dollars in Florida in 2006 and was murdered a few years later by a woman who had befriended him to take his fortune. His body was found buried under concrete, and she was convicted of first-degree murder. It’s the darkest case in the lottery-curse catalog.

Should you take the lump sum or the annuity?

For most ordinary winners the annuity is the safer choice. Spreading the money over years acts as a seatbelt: you can’t blow it all at once and a single bad decision won’t wipe you out. The lump sum gives more control but demands real financial discipline that most first-time winners don’t yet have.

How can a winner avoid the lottery curse?

Stay anonymous if your state allows it, hire a fee-only financial adviser, a tax accountant and a lawyer before spending anything, strongly consider the annuity, and don’t tear up your whole life on day one. The winners who keep their fortunes treat the money as something fragile to protect, not a faucet that runs forever.

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