Ticket Cashers – now there’s a job for you

Confession (which I’ve already made): I buy lottery tickets.

Not all the time.

But enough of the time.

Especially when there’s big ol’ jackpot just waiting out there.

Sure, I know the odds of winning. (I may not have learned how to make money during my two years of business school at MIT, but I did pick up a few bits about not losing money.) So, yep, I know that the lottery’s a sucker’s game.

But, gosh, wouldn’t it be fun to win $100M (after tax, cash option, thank you) and make a lot of people happy. Self included, once I’d changed my phone number and moved (at least temporarily) to a secret new address so that mendicants weren’t hounding me with their tales of woe.

Having revealed myself as something of a lottery lover, I was interested to read that:

The Massachusetts State Lottery continues to have a widespread problem with "ticket-cashers" who claim prizes valued at millions of dollars, apparently allowing the actual winners to avoid taxes on their winnings, the state auditor said today. (Source: Boston Globe.)

Ticket casher. Now there’s a job for you.

Here’s the deal:

The ticket-cashers are professional gamblers who are allowed to write off gambling losses against winnings.

They buy the winning tickets at a 10 percent discount.

The real winners make out better than if they took the money directly and had to pay federal and state taxes on it.  And the professional gambler gets his (and, yes, I’m guessing most of them are “his-es”) write-off.

This will obviously only work with smaller winnings. In the case of my future $100M win (which would be more like $140M pre-tax), I would think that I would have to report that I’d sold something for $90M, let alone $126M.  I’m pretty darned sure that a transaction of this magnitude would show up in “the system.”  And all I’d have to offset my $90M or $126M would be the lowly one buck I paid for the ticket, my cost of goods sold. And maybe the cost of all those loser-ama tickets I’d chumped for along the way.

But I guess if you win $10,000, and “the man” is going to skim $3K off of that, you’re better off finding a ticket casher to take the ticket off your hands.

The question is, where would you find them?

In the good old days, when I was a waitress and people played the numbers, I knew where to find the numbers runner.  He (and it was always a he) was a busboy or bartender.

Scalpers hang out at the ball park.

Touts at the racetrack.

But where does one find a ticket casher?

I googled, of course, but that just led me to mel phraze, the 20 10 ticket casher who’s a musician. (At least that’s what I think. I didn’t do a click through.)

Most of the links that came up played off the Boston Globe article (cited above).

There was that one other link, but it was just someone misspelling ticket cashier. (O tempora, o spellos.)

Then I did “I need a ticket casher,” to which query the first responder was something about buying tickets on the Metro North train.

But auditors in The Commonwealth are apparently having no problem finding ticket cashers.  Nor are the 5,938 ticket holders who managed to parlay their tickets into their hands.

Auditors found that in 2007, one person cashed 1,492 tickets worth about $2.6 million. Another person cashed 1,120 tickets worth about $1.6 million. Overall, the top 10 ticket-cashers in 2007 cashed in 5,938 tickets for $9.3 million, slightly less than the year before.

Maybe they look it up in the Yellow Pages, which I, for years, have snottily refused to allow into my home, preferring to port it directly from doorstep to recycle bin.

The state Auditor’s office is trying to crack down on ticket cashers, but this has got to be a bit tricky.  After all, as professional gamblers, can’t they just claim that they bought all those tickets professionally?

Average ticket-casher ticket size, by the way, is a paltry $1,566, not the $100M/$126M of my dreams.  Still, if baby needs a new pair of shoes, $1,566 can pay for a lot of booties (unless baby has eyes on Christian Louboutin’s).

Ticket casher.  Now there’s a job for you.