[ WP ] The lottery is an Institution designed to catch Time Travelers .

They've been here since the beginning. From the earliest lottos in Old Europe and even back to the ancient Chinese dynasties, they've been there. 
 
 Would you believe me if I told you that more that 60 % of lottery winners are time travelers? 
 
 It was a few thousand years before we finally noticed them, though. Only the best and the brightest made it to the earliest lottos in Genoa, and we've come to learn that the early ones mostly came for the experience. Dilletantes. 
 
 The professionals have been screwing us for years. The grift itself is pretty simple: you search a library or a history department for any information about an old lottery. The really good ones are encyclopedic about old lottery data. All the obvious scores, your Mega Millions, your National Lotteries, they stay far away from those. Those are easy marks, for us; we just wait around in plainclothes and ask the winner a few questions about current events. If he ca n't answer correctly, he's either an idiot or a time traveler. Either way he's a dead man. 
 
 No, see, the really good guys look for the smaller scores. Nothing too big, a few hundred thousand here, a half million there. It's a numbers game to these guys, cause they know we're on to them by now. These are the guys that got started out before taking scores in the early days. Before we caught on. Before our patient Zero, that so-called `` Luckiest woman in the world''. That Mongoloid idiot Joan Ginther. 
 
 I know the chronology is confusing, but try thinking about it backwards, like that movie Memento. Joan Ginther was the earliest big lottery time traveler. She was n't the first, she was n't the stupidest, but she was the earliest in the big lottos, at least on our timeline. OK, let me start over. 
 
 From the information our interrogations have given us, Joan Ginther was among the first people to use time travel to win lottos. Time travel had just been invented, and this was before people could set up a loop to get back to their own time zone. You plugged in a date, went to your location, and that was it - you were there til your numbers came up. 
 
 People had been hitting lottos earlier and earlier, and every time they did this it set the clocks back even further. By our intelligence reports, Joan was a rather desperate lowlife individual, who had gotten into a bad way with some bad people who were coming after her family. 
 
 Joan knew about the lottery grift, and knew she'd only have one shot. So she figured out when was the best opportunity to hit a big lotto and be able to get the money to her people in the future. Then she made her jump. 
 
 To be honest, we never would have caught on if she had n't gotten greedy. But when she won one, then two, then three, then four lottos in a row, we began to get suspicious. See, it turns out she'd also looked up the locations of a few scratch off tickets around the same time, just in case something changed and the original lotto numbers did n't work. When she hit the money on her Texas Lotto ticket, she used that money to buy out entire stores of tickets. The exact stores she knew had the winning ticket. 
 
 Her money's all gone, by the way. That story is part of the gospel of being a lotto jumper, and so they figured out a way to seize her money about 20 years in the future. And it was me that put a bullet in her skull. 
 
 Our next target is supposed to make his jump around noon tomorrow, although we're not exactly sure where. When the call comes in to the lotto office, we'll send you out to investigate the claim. Let me know if you find anything suspicious - we'll handle the rest from there.
