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Notes -
You could probably get more than the prize value by selling your lottery ticket for cash, since that would allow someone who has a lot of illegitimate cash to turn that into legitimate taxable income.
I didn't think of that, and it's an interesting idea. But I don't know many folks who have millions of dollars that need to be laundered, and it's probably too risky to trust them to hold up their end of the deal. (Also, at that point I'd be left with millions of dollars of unaccounted for cash, which seems substantially less valuable than cash that doesn't need to be laundered.)
Though I guess the biggest issue with my original scheme is that it might expose the winnings to double taxation.
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That's fair. Mostly I just thought it was interesting that a market for "sell your lottery tickets" already exists and that winning lottery tickets have a cash value that is larger than the face value of their winnings.
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