Joan Rae Ginther

Joan Rae Ginther was born in Bishop, Texas, took a mathematics degree at the University of Texas at Austin and a Stanford doctorate in 1976, then taught college mathematics in California for about a decade. Between 1993 and 2010 she claimed four multi-million-dollar Texas Lottery prizes totalling $20.4 million. The first, in 1993, was a $5.4 million share of an $11 million Lotto Texas jackpot, paid as an annuity. The next three were instant tickets: $2 million on the $30 game Holiday Millionaire in 2006, $3 million on Millions & Millions in 2008, and $10 million in June 2010 on the $50 game $140,000,000 Extreme Payout, giving $15 million in cash from scratch-offs alone. Two winning tickets were traced to Times Market, the only lottery retailer in Bishop; the 2010 ticket was bought in Kingsville. A 2014 Philadelphia Inquirer analysis of Texas Lottery records found she had claimed 28 instant prizes and estimated she had bought at least 80,000 high-price tickets costing $2 million or more. The Texas Lottery Commission said it had never investigated her winnings for fraud and described its verification system as thorough. She gave almost no interviews.

Ginther died in San Antonio on 12 April 2024, aged 77; her funeral-home obituary records a birth date of 1 April 1947 and a memorial service on 17 May 2024. She had left Las Vegas, where she moved in 2001, and returned to Texas in 2014 (2024).