Search “losing lottery tickets” on eBay and the site turns up something odd: stacks of worthless scratch-offs and instant tickets. Your choice if you want to pay by value or by weight: some listings offer a pound’s worth of losing lottery tickets from Pennsylvania for just $10, while others offer thousands of dollars’ worth of losing tickets, like Ohio lottery tickets worth $5,200 in losses, for $29.99. One listing even boasts $90,000 worth of losing Florida tickets for $575.
Why would anyone drop more than five Benjamins for $90,000 worth of losing lottery tickets? Most of the listings you’ll see on eBay will be entitled along the lines of “collectibles” or for “arts and crafts” purposes. You’ll see the word “vintage” brandished about here and there, a “rare” or “no value” dropped in others. But search long enough and you’ll see the words “tax write offs” or “tax deduction” in the titles of listings that somehow made it past eBay’s filters.
