An investigation by the Asbury Park Press found that as a group, those 10 people collected 840 prizes totalling nearly $1.8 million and that about 70 percent of those payouts were for Pick 4 tickets, where the odds of winning are 1 in 10,000.
The New Jersey Lottery told the newspaper that it is investigating some of the people on the list to see if they’re actually illegally cashing in other players’ winning tickets for a percentage of the winnings.
Lottery merchants and their relatives account for five of the New Jersey Lottery’s six most frequent prizewinners since 2009, the Asbury Park Press reported.
A leading lottery statistician told the Press that some of these people would have to have spent more than $1 million on tickets over the course of their winning streaks to be so successful.
Pramila Baile, of Millstone, whose son operates two liquor stores in Ocean County that sell lottery tickets, was the state’s most prolific lottery winner since 2009. During that time, she claimed 134 prizes totaling more than $275,000, the newspaper reported.
Since 2004, she has claimed prizes totaling almost $350,000, which included payouts of $5,000, $12,000 and $20,000 for instant scratch-off games, and dozens of prizes for winning “straight bets” in Pick 4, the Press reported.
“I’m surprised that she’s won that much,” said her son, Shravan K. Baile, the owner of Bailey’s Discount Liquors in Lakehurst and Wine World in Manchester, told the Asbury Park Press.
Baile said his mother was in India and unavailable for comment.