What happens to winners
Two Canadian cases stand out for the completeness of the giving — and both make an awkward point about what the curse genre leaves out.
The curse genre has a counterpart that gets far less attention: winners who gave the money away, largely or entirely. Two Canadian cases are unusually well documented.
In May 2013, Calgary businessman Tom Crist won a C$40 million Lotto Max prize. He kept the win private for months, and when he came forward in December 2013 it was to announce that he intended to give all of it to charity.
The motivation was personal: his wife Jan had died in February 2012 after a long illness with lung cancer. Crist, a retired executive, said he did not need the money and would direct it to cancer causes in her memory.
He then did it. His first major cheque — C$1.2 million — went to the Alberta Cancer Foundation, which raises funds for Calgary's Tom Baker Cancer Centre, where his wife had been treated (CBC, CNN).
In July 2010, Allen and Violet Large, a retired couple in Lower Truro, Nova Scotia, won a Lotto 6/49 prize of C$11.3 million.
After taking care of their family, they gave away approximately C$10.6 million — about 98% of the prize — keeping only a modest reserve. The recipients were local and specific: churches, fire departments, cemeteries, the Red Cross, and the hospitals where Violet had been treated for cancer (CBS News, CBC).
Their explanation, widely quoted at the time, was that they already had everything they needed. Violet Large died in 2011; Allen Large in 2013.
A grim footnote that says something about the ecosystem around large wins: scammers subsequently used the Larges' names in fake prize-notification frauds, trading on their genuine reputation for giving. That pattern — impersonating real winners to lend credibility to a scam — is covered in how lottery scams work and ten red flags in a win notification.
They are not evidence that giving is typical. Two documented cases prove these two things happened, nothing more. It would be exactly the error the curse genre makes to generalise from a handful of memorable stories in the opposite direction.
They do puncture the curse narrative's implicit claim — that sudden wealth reliably corrupts. Some winners give nearly all of it away, quietly and locally, and it is not obvious why those cases should count for less than the collapses.
They fit the broader research. Large winners in the best long-run study showed sustained increases in life satisfaction, and most winners keep working. A picture of people mostly making measured decisions is consistent with some of them making generous ones.
If a windfall does arrive and you intend to give substantially, two things matter more than the intention:
Tax treatment differs between the win and the gift. In most jurisdictions the prize itself and the gift are taxed under separate rules — Ireland, for instance, pays prizes tax-free but gifts above the thresholds can trigger Capital Acquisitions Tax for the recipient. The country rules are in lottery tax by country; this is a case where local advice pays for itself many times over (the first 72 hours).
Structure beats improvisation. Crist's approach — a foundation, then staged payments — is the one advisers recommend, because it converts an unmanageable volume of requests into a process with criteria. The alternative, responding to approaches as they arrive, is how generous winners end up overwhelmed.
And one measured consideration in favour of doing it quietly: publicised wins raise bankruptcy filings among the winner's neighbours by a measurable amount, through visible debt-financed spending (the neighbour effect). Anonymity, where your jurisdiction allows it, protects other people as well as you.
Last verified: 2026-08-29