They won the lottery over and over. Just luck? Or something more?

We’re thinking of a number between 1 and 1,500. Name it.

Now we’re thinking of a number between 1 and 40,000. Name it.

Now between 1 and 120,000. Can you guess the number we’re thinking of – dozens of times?

As Observer reporters Gavin Off and Adam Bell showed this week, North Carolinians are doing the equivalent of that in the state lottery, and winning millions of dollars in the process. It’s inconceivable that many of them are not gaming the system, yet North Carolina Education Lottery officials look the other way and say the winners are just very lucky people.

There are victims to these schemes. Taxpayers have to pay more because lottery winners are avoiding paying back taxes. Single parents are deprived of child support owed by people who disguise their identity when holding winning tickets. And people who truly win through dumb luck are sometimes deprived of their prizes by unscrupulous retailers.

All of it undercuts the public’s perception of the lottery as a game of chance in which everyone has an equal chance of winning. People half-jokingly say the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math. It is that for honest players. But dishonest players have math in their favor – a 100 percent chance of winning in some cases.

It is insufficient for Alice Garland, the lottery’s executive director, to dismiss concerns about people who win big prizes repeatedly. “I’ve just decided there are lucky people in this world,” she told the Observer. She added: “It comes down to frequency of play and luck.”

It comes down to much more than that. Some people sell their winning tickets for a discount to other people. The buyer collects the prize; the seller avoids required payments to the state, such as for back taxes and child support. Some store employees steal winning tickets from customers, telling them their tickets were losers.

Off and Bell found hundreds of people who are either gaming the system or beating extremely long odds over and over and over.

Ralph Havis of Greensboro has won more than $600 55 times since 2008. He won $150,000 in 2014, another $150,000 in April of this year and then $1 million in May. A Virginia Tech statistician put the odds, if Havis was playing straight up, at “less than 1 in 1 trillion, trillion, trillion.”

Betty Manning of High Point won scratch-off games 38 times in 2014 and 2015, beating long odds every time. Cecil Etheridge, the brother of former congressman Bob Etheridge, beat odds of 1 in 1,143 some 30 times.

The state could put the brakes on these shenanigans. The first thing it should do is outlaw reselling winning lottery tickets, as three other states have done. It should also prohibit retailers, employees and family members from playing the lottery at their own stores. That would remove the incentive for clerks to steal a customer’s winning ticket.

In the meantime, N.C. residents already had a lot of good reasons not to play the lottery. Now they have one more.

This story was originally published October 4, 2016 at 6:18 PM with the headline "They won the lottery over and over. Just luck? Or something more?."