Lawmakers poised to make lottery winners anonymous in Oregon. They’re gambling the decision won’t backfire

The Oregon Senate is set to take a final vote as soon as Monday on a bill that would allow all winners of Oregon Lottery games to remain anonymous, eliminating what was once considered a key transparency measure to maintain integrity and public trust in the games.

Lawmakers’ renewed push toward secrecy comes in the aftermath of investigations by The Oregonian/OregonLive last year that found millions of dollars in winnings have flowed to a business in Australia or been rerouted to local opportunists who purchase scores of winning tickets from the true owners at a discount, claiming the full prizes for themselves.

Lawmakers pledged to prohibit the latter issue. But in the process, they tacked on a secrecy provision to the reform bill that would make it all but impossible for the newsroom or the public to learn the names of lottery winners.

Oregon is one of 23 states that publicly discloses the identities of all prize winners. The anonymity provision received no substantive debate in House and Senate committees that reviewed the bill. Of those 12 committee members, only one, Sen. Kathleen Taylor, D-Portland, responded to a request for comment about why she supported the amendment enabling anonymity.

“Giving people the option of privacy when they win the lottery is especially important nowadays with the internet and social media, when everything else about you is available for the world to see,” Taylor’s spokesperson, Alex Blosser, wrote in an email. “… This bill doesn’t stop the Lottery’s ability to monitor winners and ensure compliance with the law.”

The bill has already sailed through the House with bipartisan support and appears poised to pass the Senate next week. It’s unclear if Gov. Tina Kotek is supportive or if she would sign the bill into law. Her office did not respond to requests for comment.

Oregon lottery officials have taken no public stance on the bill but acknowledged they’re not aware of any winners in the state who have been subjected to extreme harassment because their names were made public. A transparency advocate and other observers criticized Oregon’s anonymity provision and warned that it could shield lottery officials from accountability.

“If something goes wrong or someone figures out how to game the process, how would Oregonians know?” said an emailed statement from Nick Budnick, a board member at the Oregon chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and editor of The Lund Report, an online news organization that covers healthcare. “‘Trust us’ is not a substitute for transparency.”

Kevin Looper, a former Democratic political strategist who dealt with lottery issues as an adviser to former Gov. Kate Brown, said making winners anonymous in Oregon is “a horrible idea.” The lottery used to be marketed as a state game for Oregonians but he contends it has become a tool of international resellers charging big markups and looking to avoid accountability.

“Lottery winners aren’t victims in need of assistance,” he said. “And the lobbyists working this bill aren’t trying to protect the oppressed.”

Rob Kohler, a former Texas lottery employee who now consults and lobbies for the Christian Life Commission, said anonymity rules were adopted by the Texas Legislature in 2017 and, like in Oregon, were sold as a way to protect players.

In reality, he said, he believes it is part of a coordinated attempt to legitimize the sale of lottery games across state lines and internationally.

“The linchpin of keeping it on the downlow is anonymity,” he said. “It serves as a method to cover their tracks. Once it’s anonymous, they can sell the tickets without telling the public the winner is in Florida or in Shanghai, China.”

Texas is a case study. In 2023, an anonymous European betting syndicate worked to purchase tickets for nearly every possible combination of numbers for that state’s big game. They turned to so-called lottery courier services that typically take orders from customers over the internet or phone apps and have dedicated terminals to print out those customers’ tickets. The group spent more than $25 million on tickets and won, scoring a $95 million jackpot.

The group pulled off the scheme with the blessing and aid of state lottery officials, according to accounts in The New York Times and other media outlets. State officials ensured the group could purchase enough combinations by delivering dozens of extra terminals that could be used to print tickets on an industrial scale. Lottery watchers were aware something was afoot as the jackpot skyrocketed in the days before the drawing, and it became a political firestorm when an anonymous Delaware limited liability company came forward to collect the prize.

It’s name: Rook TX.

“What we had was a criminal enterprise within our government,” Texas State Sen. Bob Hall told the Times in an article about the incident that published Sunday.

That scandal is ongoing and intensified after a woman in February won $83 million on a ticket purchased through a courier’s app, with that jackpot now in dispute. Meanwhile, the Texas Lottery director quit abruptly on Monday. And a class action lawsuit has been filed against lottery vendors and Rook TX in an effort to recover money spent by Texans on ticket purchases for what they contend was a stolen jackpot.

Melanie Mesaros, a spokesperson for the Oregon Lottery, said the odds are low of someone trying to rig Oregon’s big draw game, Megabucks, in a similar fashion to the 2023 scheme in Texas. That’s mostly because the jackpot rarely gets out of the single digit millions, and it would cost more than $6 million to purchase every possible combination of numbers. But they occasionally go much higher.

The Oregon Lottery has been selling tickets since 1985 and had revenues of $1.7 billion in 2024, generating income of $942 million after paying prizes and other expenses. That money supports schools, state parks, economic development, veterans services and other programs.

The agency has demonstrated its willingness to operate in the gray areas of lottery rules in order to maximize sales. Like Texas, it has embraced and facilitated high-volume ticket sales by courier services who print out tickets on dedicated terminals housed in annexes of Portland and Beaverton retailers and bars.

The lottery made couriers’ bulk purchasing of tickets possible in 2016 by allowing pay slips, which are fed into a machine to generate tickets, to be printed digitally instead of filled out by hand. At the time the permanent rules were adopted, the director of the Oregon Lottery was Barry Pack. Pack is now chief of staff to Sen. President Rob Wagner.

In 2019, the Oregon House approved a bill that would have offered anonymity to prize winners of multi-state lotteries sold in Oregon, such as Powerball. But the bill died in the Senate without a full vote under then-President Peter Courtney.

Wagner’s spokesperson, Connor Radnovich, said Wagner “is focused on other legislation and doesn’t have a comment” on this year’s anonymity provisions. Pack declined to comment.

The new anonymity clause was tacked onto House Bill 3115 and drew supporting testimony from Darian Stanford, a Tonkon Torp attorney who works with TheLotter, a courier service owned by a company in Malta. Stanford described the supposed “lottery curse” to lawmakers, in which jackpot winners’ lives are ruined because their names and winnings are made public, and they are subject to doxxing and harassment forevermore. He didn’t provide any examples of that happening in Oregon, and no lawmakers questioned the scope of the purported problem.

Stanford was also the author of the ill-fated anonymity bill in 2019, he told legislators at the time.

Stanford said in a text message that Oregon isn’t Texas, that couriers have operated responsibly in Oregon for a decade without incident, and that the only change being made is that the world won’t know details about lottery winners here unless they consent to the release of their names.

Lottery couriers operations, he wrote, “have resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for Oregonians and the programs and services we cherish.”

The original aim of this year’s lottery reform bill was to prohibit lottery prize winners from selling their tickets to third parties at a discount, with opportunists then redeeming the tickets for their full face values.

A newsroom investigation found that Oregon has a cottage industry of entrepreneurs who annually buy millions of dollars worth of tickets from the original winners for 50 to 80 cents on the dollar. Some of those individuals deduct the price they pay as a business expense on their personal taxes.

The practice enables tax evasion on the full value of the prize. It also allows the original winners to get paid a portion of their winnings while potentially avoiding past due child support and other debts to the state, which can be garnished when tickets are redeemed at lottery payment centers in Salem and Wilsonville.

The Oregon Lottery was well aware of that practice for years. It adopted rules in 2023 preventing lottery retailers from participating and started forwarding a list of high volume prize claimants to the Department of Revenue. But little else was done until The Oregonian/OregonLive, using public records of winners’ names and prizes, last year identified the most prolific discounters and how they did business.

“I absolutely think it should be regulated,” Rep. John Lively, D-Springfield, told the newsroom in response to the investigation. Lively went on to sponsor the reform bill, which would prohibit the selling of winning tickets. But early in the process, records show, a Legislative attorney warned that existing state law should already prohibit such sales and said it was doubtful such a bill would have “practical effect if enacted into law.”

Lively moved forward with the bill anyway, and it so far has garnered almost unanimous support with the secrecy provision attached. Over the past month Lively has not returned repeated messages from the newsroom about the legislation’s anonymity clause, which would make the names of winners of any game -- not just multi-state lotteries -- public only if winners consent to disclosure in writing.

Separately, the newsroom last year used the same public records that name winning lottery players to identify an Australian company called The Lottery Office that has set up a shadow lottery in Australia, selling facsimiles of the Mega Millions and Powerball lotteries to customers in Australia and New Zealand. The company insured its lottery by purchasing identically numbered tickets at a bar in Beaverton and said it passed winnings along to players, while it collected a service fee for buying the tickets.

Oregon lottery officials blessed that practice, too, and facilitated it by providing extra lottery terminals to the local bar, The Pit Stop Sports Bar & BBQ Grill. That business became the largest retailer of Powerball and Mega Millions tickets in the state, the newsroom found.

Those winning tickets were always listed in state records as being claimed by one person: Mike Platzer, an executive at The Lottery Office. Platzer didn’t even need to come to Oregon to collect the winnings. He gave the owner of the bar in Beaverton, Dani Rosendahl, power of attorney to do it for him.

In about five years, Platzer made 104 winning claims for Powerball and Mega Millions totaling $4.8 million – with all but one of those wins at The Pit Stop. Mesaros, the lottery spokesperson, said The Pit Stop has now been sold and the courier business moved to another retail location.

Oregon lottery officials actively facilitated such business, even after the Mega Millions consortium in 2018 asked them to prohibit sales to international customers, a practice other states consider a violation of the consortium’s rules.

Going forward, rigging a Megabucks game wouldn’t be easy, and would require a similar degree of cooperation from the Oregon Lottery that bettors reportedly got in Texas – assistance that would not be forthcoming, local officials insist.

Mesaros said there are 12.2 million possible combinations of numbers in Megabucks, and it costs $1 for two sets. Printing more than 6 million tickets over the 72-hour period between draws would require dozens of high-volume terminals. As it stands, there are two retailers in Oregon that each have eight terminals, and a third with six.

“Oregon Lottery’s retailer contract makes it clear that we control the placement of the machines,” Mesaros said in an email. “Given the fact that we don’t want to mirror what happened in Texas, we have no interest in allowing additional terminals at retailers to facilitate bulk purchases.”

She said that while the agency has no formal stance on HB 3115 or its anonymity provision, the names of winners would still be known to lottery officials and, unlike in Texas, winners would not be able to claim their winnings through an anonymous trust or LLC.

Dawn Nettles, a plaintiff in the class action suit in Texas and the author of the Lottoreport, an online newsletter that covers the Texas Lottery, said no lottery should offer anonymity to winners.

“This opens the door for bad actors,” she said. “And if anything has been shown here in Texas, there are plenty of bad actors.”

- Ted Sickinger is a reporter on the investigations team. Reach him at 503-221-8505, tsickinger@oregonian.com or @tedsickinger

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