Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Roggey, and today we're talking about financial crime associated with lotteries.

Whatever your thoughts on lotteries generally, ranging from it's just harmless fun to they constitute a debilitating regressive tax, something we rarely hear about is this other side of lotteries, and it's fascinating.

My guest today is Jeff Kelly Lowenstein. Jeff is a professor focused on multimedia journalism at Grand Valley State University in Michigan,

and he's investigated a broad range of topics with a particular focus on vulnerable individuals,

including reverse mortgage scams and nursing home abuses.

Jeff, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you very much for having me, Alexandra.

Really appreciate the opportunity to talk about the work.

Thank you.

Before we launch directly into lotteries and the categories of misconduct associated with those,

the holidays are upon us.

And I'm curious, do you have any thoughts on why we associate lotteries with the holidays?

It's an excellent question, Alexandra, and in fact, in Spain, which has one of the biggest

lotteries in the world, El Gordo, which means kind of the big one or the heavy one, all

across the country, it builds up to the culmination of a drawing of which one person wins half of the prize,

and then the other half goes to charity.

So not just in the United States or Canada, but really in countries around the world,

lottery has become integrated into the fabric of daily life.

And that really was the impetus for those of us who engaged initially in the project

to start to look into bringing out the existence, the structure, and the system behind this activity,

which, as you said, in holidays and in just daily activity buying groceries,

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