An international investigation into the global lottery industry.

It involves close to 40 people from 10 countries working in journalism and civic tech organizations in Africa, Europe and the United States.

After months of work we have revealed the following:

• The industry’s massive scale, which reached nearly $300 billion in 2014, a sum that was greater than than the gross domestic product of 157 countries that year.
• The eight companies that play an outsized role in lotteries around the world, operating in as many as 100 countries.
• The World Lottery Association, a non-profit association based in Switzerland that is heavily funded by these eight influential companies. The association espouses its commitment to responsible gaming and its member lotteries’ charitable donations while regularly convening seminars and international conferences to plan how to continually boost lottery sales.
• The financial moves of International Game Technology (IGT), one of the planet’s largest companies that has allowed it to avoid hundreds of million of dollars in taxes while helping to run a public endeavor that many studies have found amounts to a regressive tax on poor people.
• The many questionable recipients of lottery funding in South Africa that have received tens, even hundreds, of millions of Rand, but often have meager results to show from that public investment.
• The lavish parties thrown by the political elite in Mali with funding from the national lottery.
• An analysis of more than 11 million records of lottery winners from 35 states and the District of Columbia that found more than 1,700 people across the United States winning significant lottery prizes at least 50 times. Statistical calculations showed that some of the winners tallied their wins despite almost incomprehensibly low odds.

This site is the repository for all of the content produced by team members in newspapers, on radio stations, on television and online. It includes stories, photographs, graphics, infographics, a searchable tool of lottery recipients, an animated video explaining one winner’s improbable odds, a map of frequent winners throughout the United States, and other videos.

Dig in.

Play around.

And let us know what you think.

We welcome your feedback and ideas about other areas of this critical topic we should cover.