Mavis Wanczyk speaks during a news conference where she claimed the $758.7 million Powerball prize at Massachusetts State Lottery headquarters. Photo / AP
Mavis Wanczyk speaks during a news conference where she claimed the $758.7 million Powerball prize at Massachusetts State Lottery headquarters. Photo / AP
In many American states, lottery winners must do a bit of publicity work before they can plop down some cash for their own water park or go on a decades-long shopping spree.
By law, many must have their names publicised or do mandatory news conferences - a convention that servesto both silence whispers that the lottery system is fixed and to convince other would-be ticket-buyers that "this, too, could be you". But the publicity that comes with a person's newfound and sudden wealth can turn a lottery winner into a target. Perhaps with that in mind, police have beefed up patrols around the home of Mavis Wanczyk.
On Thursday Wanczyk was a hospital worker. On Friday, she became the winner of the largest undivided lottery jackpot in North American history - some US$758.7 million. Wanczyk took a lump-sum payment of US$480 million, leaving her US$336 million after taxes. She is no longer a hospital worker.
Officer Michael Wilk, a spokesman for Chicopee police, said that a police car is parked in Wanczyk's driveway. "We want her to know we're there if she needs us."
Wilk said that neighbours reported people hanging around "knocking on doors, asking people where she lives. We're not going to tolerate her being harassed or bothered".
Falling prey to fraudsters or robbers is one thing, but for some lottery winners, a life-changing win has morphed into a death sentence.
In November 2015, Craigory Burch won a US$434,272 jackpot. Two months later, police said, Burch was killed in his home by seven masked men who kicked in his front door in Georgia. His family members said the public announcement of the lottery winnings had made him a target.
"When they came in, he said: 'Don't do it, bro. Don't do it in front of my kids. Please don't do it in front of my kids and old lady'," his girlfriend, Jasmine Hendricks, told WALB-TV at the time. "He said, 'I'll give you my bank card'."
Abraham Shakespeare won a US$30 million lottery prize in 2006. Two years later, he was approached by Dorice Moore, who said she was writing a book about how people were taking advantage of him. She became his financial adviser and slowly siphoned away his money. "She got every bit of his money," Assistant State Attorney Jay Pruner said. "He found out about it and threatened to kill her. She killed him first."
