Jeff Kelly Lowenstein has been leading reporters from across the globe in an investigation of the worldwide lottery industry.
In the United States, he assembled a team from the Columbia Journalism School and PennLive as part of an ambitious reporting project to better understand how lotteries are gamed by some of their frequent players. The team submitted public records requests to every state with a lottery, sending more than 100 public record requests to obtain information about their winners, game odds and investigative reports.
Kelly Lowenstein also partnered with about 40 people, including journalists, from 10 countries, who worked in the United States, Europe and Africa. They discovered a massive industry, nearly $300 billion strong in 2014 – an amount greater than the gross domestic product of 157 countries. Eight companies play an outsized role in lotteries around the world, operating in as many as 100 countries. Some of these companies have avoided hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes and have sought to curry favor by hosting lavish parties.
[Reporting for this project was provided by the Green Park Foundation.]