The winner of the second-biggest prize in the history of the Mega Millions lottery has taken the mother of his daughter to court for telling his parents about the win despite signing an NDA.

The unidentified man, who chose to remain anonymous, for obvious reasons, claims that his daughter’s mother was one of the few people who knew about his lottery win in January 2023. She was asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) preventing her from spilling the beans to anyone for a period of almost a decade, as the lottery winner considered “the best uses of the life-changing prize,” but she broke that legally-binding agreement by allegedly telling his parents and sister. Now, the man wants her to pay compensation of “no less than $100,000 per unauthorized disclosure”.

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A Chinese man who concelaed a lottery win of 10 million yuan ($1.5 million) from his then-wife for two years has been ordered by a court of law to compensate the woman.

In 2021, the man, surnamed Zhou, won a lottery prize of 10 million yuan. After paying the mandatory tax, he was left with 8.43 million ($1.23 million). That was still lifechanging money for him and his family, only instead of sharing the wonderful news with his wife, he reportedly kept acting like nothing happened. On the day that the lottery prize was wired to his bank account, Zhou transferred 2 million to his sister and another 700,000 yuan to his ex-wife, to help her buy an apartment. He didn’t mention the lottery win to his wife for two years.

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A Chinese man recently made international news headlines for collecting his lottery winnings in disguise in order to keep his identity a secret from his own family.

Identified only by the pseudonym Li, the Chinese man reportedly bought 40 lottery tickets from somewhere in China’s Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, with all of them containing the same seven numbers. His gamble paid off big time, as he was able to pocket a whopping 220 million yuan (5.48 million yuan per ticket). That’s around $30 million, life-changing money, not just for him but for his entire family. But instead of celebrating the win with his wife and kids, Li reportedly played it cool, preferring to keep the good news a secret from them.

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Imagine going from having nothing to your name to winning over a quarter of a million dollars only to be unable to claim it due to a lack of ID. That’s exactly the problem an Algerian undocumented immigrant in Belgium is facing right now.

A few ago, the lottery winner, whose name has not been disclosed for obvious reasons, went into a shop in Zeebrugge, a Belgian port city and popular transit point for migrants and refugees, and bought a lottery scratchcard. he paid 5 euros for it and ended up winning a whopping 250,000 euros ($270,000). He was so stunned that he had a friend verify the prize, and then they both double-checked with the shop owner. He had won 250,000 euros and his life was about to change for the better. Or so he thought…

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A 49-year-old man in South West China has spent the past decade living rough under a bridge trying to break the lottery code.

Wang Chengzhou used to work construction in Sichuan Province, but moved to Chongqing in 2008 after suffering a work-related injury. Instead of using the $50,000 yuan he had received as compensation from his former employer to start a new life, Wang spent it all on his obsession – cracking the lottery code. He cut off all communication with his family and settled under a bridge where he has been working hard on figuring out the algorithms behind the lottery. After 10 years of hard work, he claims to have finally cracked the secret to getting filthy rich overnight.

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Jane Park was only 17 years old when she won the £1 million ($1.6 million) Euromillions jackpot, four years ago. She was ecstatic at the time, but Park has recently revealed that she plans to sue the lottery for negligence. She claims that winning so much money at a young age has ruined her life, and argues that argues that people under 18 should not be allowed to play the lottery.

Ms. Park was working as an admin temp, earning $13 an hour, when she won the lottery. She now owns two properties, drives a Range Rover and can afford all the designer clothes and handbag she used to only dream of. But that doesn’t mean she’s happy. If anything, splurging on these material things sometimes just makes it worse, to the point where she feels that her life has no real meaning. It’s definitely not how she pictured her life when she went public as Britain’s youngest Euromillions lottery winner, four years ago.

“At times it feels like winning the lottery has ruined my life. I thought it would make it 10 times better but it’s made it 10 times worse. I wish I had no money most days. I say to myself, ‘My life would be so much easier if I hadn’t won’,” Jane said. “People look at me and think, ‘I wish I had her lifestyle, I wish I had her money.’ But they don’t realize the extent of my stress. I have material things but apart from that my life is empty. What is my purpose in life?”

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A Chinese man was recently in the news for not only winning millions of yuan in a lottery, but also for the bizarre costume he wore while collecting his prize. The man, believed to be about 40 years old, was so worried about revealing his identity that he actually turned up dressed as the popular Disney character Baymax!

Speaking to reporters, the man revealed that he had won 170 million yuan (approximately $27 million) even though he rarely buys lottery tickets.  As for the strange costume, the man revealed that his wife forced him into wearing it, fearing that old friends and long-lost relatives might suddenly show up expecting a small share of the prize. But no costume can actually help him evade the mandatory 20 percent tax on lottery winnings, which means he will have to cough up about 34 million yuan to give back to the state.

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Now this is what you call a dream-come-true. No, scratch that. It’s more like the ‘wildest’ dream-come-true. When László Andraschek used his last few coins to purchase a lottery ticket, I’m sure he had no real hope of winning the jackpot – a whopping 600 million forint (US $2.70 million) – but it actually happened. The 55-year-old Hungarian went from being a homeless tramp to a millionaire, overnight.

For seven long years, Andraschek lived in a homeless shelter in the city of Győr. “It all happened to me, I remember it, but I don’t miss it,” he said about his experience of being homeless. He was also a recovering alcoholic at the time. “I had drunk myself out of the family by the age of 31. I was the last child at home and spent all my wages on drink. I worked on-and-off as an agricultural repairman. I lived the typical life of an alcoholic and I thought it was all right.”

It came to a point where Andraschek’s siblings were fed up of him and asked their mother to kick him out. This was in 1989; at age 31, Andraschek had become completely destitute. He tried to hang himself, but the rope snapped and he ended up losing a foot. “Even losing a foot didn’t make me mend my ways because I would blame everyone around me, anyone but myself.” In 1991, he registered himself as homeless.

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“This is completely insane… we don’t even play the lottery that often,” 29-year-old Hege Jeanette Oksnes said after her family won their third national lottery jackpot in the last six years. The most bizarre thing is it always happened after she gave birth to a child.

Just last week, Tord, Hege Jeanette’s 19-year-old brother won 12.2 million crowns (S$2.6 million) in the national Norwegian lottery, adding to the Oksnes family’s growing wealth. Previously, Jeanette herself won 8,2 million crowns ($1,4 million), and her father 12 million crowns ($2,1 million), playing in the same lottery. Three members of the same family winning the lottery in the last six years doesn’t happen very often, but after connecting the dots, the Oksnes have apparently identified what makes them so incredibly lucky. The first two times they won the lottery it happened just hours after Jeanette gave birth, and the third time stroke of luck occurred three months after she had her third child. The young mother told AFP she has three brothers who have yet to win the lottery and they asked her to have at least 10 other children. But after three children, Jeanette thinks it may be time to call it quits. “My husband thinks we have enough money now,” she says.

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