Millions Slipping Away: Inside the Most Jaw-Dropping Powerball Lottery Losses

In recent years, lottery jackpots have reached intense highs, with billion-dollar prizes making headlines consistently. The same can be said this month, as Powerball numbers continue to climb, bringing hope to anyone who can afford to buy a $2 ticket. Yet history shows that sudden, massive wealth can bring as many challenges as it does opportunities. In fact, some of the biggest lottery winners have found themselves worse off than ever before after they cash their checks.

In light of lottery numbers this month, 247 Tempo takes a closer look at those who struck it rich only to lose it all. In the shadow of today's historic payouts, these cautionary tales reveal just how quickly fortune can flip. Lady Luck isn't always kind, and here's the evidence to back it up.

Sources for this piece include Moneydigest.com, Yahoo! Finance, Forbes.com, Fox 5 Atlanta, and The Mirror.

This post was updated on August 15th, 2025, to reflect recent lottery statistics.

After Suzanne Mullins won $4.2 million in the Virginia State Lottery in 1993, she was relatively selfless with the money. Mullins split the payout with her husband and daughter, leaving her with an annual payment of $47,826 over 20 years. Her son-in-law needed a million dollars to cover his health care costs so Mullins came to the rescue.

This rendered Mullins broke and forced her to take a loan from a lending company by using her remaining lottery winnings as collateral. She fell behind on the payments, however, so the company took her to court and won a settlement to the tune of $154,000. By this point, Mullins was completely out of money and she couldn't pay the settlement. Tragically, her story suggests that no good deeds go unpunished.

Even before he won the lottery, Curtis Sharp was eccentric. Case in point: he showed up to collect his lottery win in 1982 with his wife and girlfriend before starring in a New York State Lottery commercial. After securing his millions, Sharp moved to Antioch, Tennessee, where he spent excessively on houses, cars, and gifts for the opposite sex.

By 2016, Sharp was stone-cold broke. There was a silver lining to his ordeal, however, as Sharp found God in the process of losing his earthly riches and became a Baptist minister. When asked by Fox 5 Atlanta about his situation, Sharp said "I don't have one penny of that," before adding: "God has blessed me. I am doing good. I have been through a lot but he has brought me out. I'm OK."

Before Lisa Arcand won the lottery she was a single mother with dreams of opening a seafood restaurant. Upon winning $1 million in the Massachusetts State Lottery in 2004, suddenly those dreams seemed within reach. Arcand celebrated her win by opening several $200 bottles of wine with her closest friends before spending extravagantly. She sent her son to a $10,000-per-year private school, took several vacations, and bought a furnished house. To give herself more leeway, Arcand avoided the lottery's $35,000-per-year maximum payment schedule by diverting $15,000 of her winnings a year to a loan company for a $200,000 advance.

With this, she finally opened her seafood restaurant and named it Fisherman's Corner. Arcand quickly learned, however, that slim margins mean 60% of restaurants fail in their first year. Indeed, Fisherman's Corner failed within six months. Years later, Arcand spoke out about her lottery experience. She told The Mirror, "Winning the lottery is not all it's cracked up to be. Actually, it's been very depressing."

Sometimes the shock of incoming money can be too much for people to bear. Take Willie Hurt, for example. In 1989, Hurt won $3.1 million in the Michigan State Lottery. His 20-year annual stipend of $156,000 should have helped him and his wife and three kids. Within two years, however, Hurt was broke, addicted to crack cocaine, and in the process of a divorce. Things went from bad to worse for Hurt after he murdered his acquaintance Wendy Elizabeth Kimmey during a multiple-day drug binge.

After turning himself in to Lansing, Michigan, police, Hurt was arraigned on open murder charges. Despite making a signed confession, Hurt could not recall confessing to anything. Remarkably, the trail went dead after that. The verdict was never made public and the last media reporting on Hurt's fate happened back in 1991.

While most relationship fights happen over money, a sudden cash injection doesn't seem to bode well for relationships either. After Denise Rossi won $1.3 million in a California Lottery on Dec. 28, 1996, she got greedy. She divorced her husband of 25 years less than two weeks later and kept her win a secret. He found out she won the lottery two years later upon opening a letter discussing lump sum lottery payments.

The case made its way to a California Superior Court. After admitting that she had kept her lottery win a secret, Judge Richard Denner found Rossi guilty of violating state disclosure laws. As a result, Rossi was forced to pay her now ex-husband annual installments of $66,800 for 20 years. Perhaps honesty is the best policy, after all.

The odds of winning the lottery once are astronomical. The odds of winning twice, however, enter into the realms of the impossible. Even so, chance worked in Evelyn Adams' favor when she won $3.9 million in 1985. Four months later, she won another $1.4 million. In short order, Adams paid off her debts and set up a college fund for her daughter. She made some bad business investments, however, and gave in to her gambling addiction. Adams started spending more and more time at Atlantic City casinos and continued to buy hundreds of dollars worth of lottery tickets each week.

The two lottery wins didn't help her mental health either. While some friends were supportive of her newfound finances, others resented it. Furthermore, Adams felt like she had lost her privacy. The money she did give away to friends was never paid back and she deferred her dreams of opening a music store to make more bad investments with an increasingly dwindling bankroll. By 2012, Adams had burned through her multimillion-dollar lottery payments and was reduced to living in a trailer.

When Alex and Rhoda Toth bought the lottery ticket that changed their lives in 1990, they were down to $24.76 between them. They won $13 million with $666,666 to be paid out yearly. Perhaps that number was an omen, however, because things became increasingly disastrous in the Toth's personal lives. They spent the next several years going on exotic vacations and rubbing shoulders with the super-rich. Not long after, the Toths took their teenage son to court where they accused him of threatening to kill their dog and set their cars on fire.

Suffice it to say, things didn't get better for the couple after that. With their funds dwindling, the Toths filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection in 2001 and 2002 to repay creditors but keep their property. The IRS had something to say, however. In 2006, the couple was charged with tax fraud and ended up owing the government $2.5 million in unpaid taxes. By that point, the Toths were living in squalor, relying on electricity from a car battery. The couple eventually split before Alex died in 2008. Rhoda was sentenced to two years in prison that same year. She was once quoted as saying, "Sometimes I wish we could give it back."

Some people spend their lottery winnings carefully, making sound investments year after year. Others, like William Bud Post, however, can barely keep the money in their pocket. When Post won $16.2 million in a Pennsylvania Lottery in 1988, he had $2.46 to his name. His lottery win made him rich and would provide $497,953 per year for two decades if only he could hold onto it. Instead, Post spent $300,000 within two weeks of the first payout. To be fair, he was generous with his money as he bought properties and a fleet of cars for his siblings.

He also bought increasingly ludicrous items like a $260,000 sailboat and a twin-engine plane he didn't know how to fly. Within three months of winning, Post was $500,000 in debt. To add insult to injury, one of his siblings hired a hitman to kill Post so he could collect the inheritance. This failed, but Post's landlady and girlfriend succeeded in taking a third of his winnings, forcing Post to file for bankruptcy. He died of respiratory failure in 2006 without a dollar in his pocket.

Before he became rich from the lottery, David Lee Edwards spent over a third of his life in prison for bank robbery. Upon gaining his freedom, Edwards moved into his deceased family's home where he struggled to make ends meet. He often had to borrow money from friends to keep his water and electricity running. Sometime in 2021, Edwards was reduced to a net worth of $7. He bought a slice of pizza and two lottery tickets that changed his life forever. He won $27 million in the Powerball and immediately asked for a one-time lump-sum payment. Within a year, Edwards and his girlfriend burned through half of the money by buying a Palm Beach mansion, a fleet of luxury cars, and a personal Lear Jet with an on-call pilot.

To his credit, Edwards sought out a financial planner who devised a plan that would have brought in $85,000 a month. He made a series of bad business moves, however, like buying racehorses and opening a fiber optics company. The years went on, and Edwards fell into an increasingly unstable drug addiction. This led to more burning of money and repeated run-ins with law enforcement. Within five years of winning the Powerball, Edwards and his girlfriend were broke and living in a waste-ridden storage shed. He died in 2003 while in hospice care, still owing thousands of dollars.

Perhaps the most remarkable lottery story ever is that of Andrew Jackson Whittaker Jr. In 2002, he became the largest single-ticket lottery winner in history when he won the $315 million Powerball jackpot. Since Whittaker opted for a lump sum, he received $113.4 million after taxes. Instead of being a blessing, however, this historic win became something of a curse for Whittaker. His wife divorced him, their daughter died of cancer and his granddaughter was found dead. Then, his house burned to the ground and he became the target of repeated thefts.

Unable to cope, he turned to gambling and drinking which only beget more problems. Unlike other people on this list, he was already a millionaire when he won the Powerball but it seemed nothing could stop his plague of bad luck. Casinos he frequented sued him for bouncing checks and he faced charges for soliciting relations from employees. He also had thousands of dollars stolen out of his car twice but bragged about the incidents. By all accounts, Whittaker kept some of the money until his death but at what cost?