{"id":5311,"date":"2026-08-15T09:15:38","date_gmt":"2026-08-15T09:15:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=5311"},"modified":"2026-08-15T09:15:38","modified_gmt":"2026-08-15T09:15:38","slug":"some-gamblers-are-buying-losing-lottery-tickets-on-ebay-as-a-way-offset-taxes-on-their-gambling-wins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=5311","title":{"rendered":"Some gamblers are buying losing lottery tickets on eBay as a way offset taxes on their gambling wins"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Why would anyone drop more than five Benjamins for $90,000 worth of losing lottery tickets? Most of the listings you\u2019ll see on eBay will be entitled along the lines of \u201ccollectibles\u201d or for \u201carts and crafts\u201d purposes. You\u2019ll see the word \u201cvintage\u201d brandished about here and there, a \u201crare\u201d or \u201cno value\u201d dropped in others. But search long enough and you\u2019ll see the words \u201ctax write offs\u201d or \u201ctax deduction\u201d in the titles of listings that somehow made it past eBay\u2019s filters. <\/p>\n

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\u201cThis is a way to offset your taxes\u2014clearly tax fraud,\u201d said Jeffrey Hoopes, a professor of accounting at the University of North Carolina\u2019s Kenan-Flagler Business School and research director of the UNC Tax Center. \u201cThere\u2019s lots of ways to commit tax fraud. This is just an interesting one, and usually you don\u2019t buy it on eBay, so it\u2019s an interesting example.\u201d<\/p>\n

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All earnings from lotteries, raffles, sports betting, horse races and casinos are fully taxable and must be reported on a return. Thanks to a narrow provision in the tax code, IRS Topic 419, people can offset the taxes from their gambling winnings. <\/p>\n

But losses can only be deducted by filers who itemize and who kept a record of both winnings and losses, and the deduction is capped at whatever winnings were reported. To back up that deduction, the IRS requires an accurate diary of winnings and losses, plus receipts, tickets, statements or other records.<\/p>\n

So in other words, those stacks of lottery tickets or scratch-offs on eBay may be benefitting a select group of people looking to bring their gambling wins home, tax free. Sometimes, however, Hoopes said people might actually just like to hold onto tickets.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThere are people who collect all sorts of random pieces of paper for whatever reason that don\u2019t necessarily have to do with fraudulent tax documentation. So I do not doubt that even if you couldn\u2019t deduct gambling losses for taxes, that somebody might be willing to buy these stacks.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

An eBay spokesperson confirmed as much in a statement to Fortune<\/em>: \u201cExpired lottery tickets with collectible value may be listed on eBay as long as the listing clearly states the item is expired and is permitted for sale under local law. Listings that promote potentially improper uses of these items are not allowed and will be removed.\u201d <\/p>\n

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The company\u2019s lottery ticket policy says as much as well. That leaves little room to read \u201cTAX WRITE OFFS\u201d as anything but the improper use eBay says it screens for.<\/p>\n

While eBay removes any listings that go against its terms of service, but that doesn\u2019t stop creative loopholes.<\/p>\n

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\u201cEBay just facilitates transactions between two people. They never take hold of the inventory,\u201d Hoopes said. \u201cI don\u2019t see eBay really ever being liable, but I\u2019m not a lawyer.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Gambling is growing in the U.S.<\/h2>\n

Last year, Americans wagered roughly $166 billion on sports alone, more than the country\u2019s film, music, book and museum industries generated combined. That figure doesn\u2019t include lottery play, casino gaming, or the tribal wagering that regulators can\u2019t easily track. <\/p>\n

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This year has added an entirely new channel on top of that base: prediction markets. Combined monthly trading volume on Kalshi and Polymarket rose from less than $5 billion in September 2025 to about $24 billion in April 2026, according to a Pew Research Center analysis\u2014a level that already tops the roughly $14 billion legal sportsbooks handled per month, on average, in 2025. <\/p>\n

During the summer\u2019s World Cup, prediction-market activity swelled to roughly 27% of all legal U.S. sports-betting volume, up from 9% at the start of the year, with Kalshi at one point seeing nearly 10 times its early-2026 pace. Every one of those contracts produces a winner and a loser, and every winner owes the IRS money on the same terms as someone cashing a winning lottery ticket.<\/p>\n

The IRS\u2019s own compliance record on gambling income suggests plenty of winners simply don\u2019t report it in the first place, long before anyone gets to the question of fake tickets. A 2024 by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) found that nearly 149,000 people who won more than $15,000 gambling between 2018 and 2020 never filed a return reflecting it, accounting for $13.2 billion in unreported winnings. TIGTA estimated the IRS could collect roughly $1.4 billion more in taxes annually just by pursuing those cases. <\/p>\n

Hoopes said he keeps a three-inch stack of losing tickets in the school\u2019s tax museum, bought on eBay, for research. Using historical eBay listing data pulled from ListingsHistory.com, he tracked auctions tagged \u201closing lottery tickets\u201d from 2014 to 2017 and charted them by month. Listings climb from 59 in January to a peak of 66 in March, and hold near that level through April, then fall by more than half by June, before bottoming out around 27 to 33 a month for the rest of the year aside from a smaller bump to 41 in September. The high months line up with the run-up to the April 15 filing deadline; the low months line up with everything after it.<\/p>\n

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The timing points to three different kinds of fraudsters, Hoopes said: someone stocking up in April while filing a return, someone buying in December while closing out the year\u2019s paperwork, or someone buying only after getting audited\u2014in which case purchases would spread evenly through the year rather than cluster.<\/p>\n

Whatever the timing, Hoopes doesn\u2019t hedge on what the purchase amounts to. He compared it to fabricating receipts for a small business: most people commit that kind of fraud simply by not reporting income, he said, but some are tempted to manufacture paper to back up invented expenses. <\/p>\n

One thing has changed since Hoopes first wrote about this: the tax treatment of gambling losses itself. Under the the One Big Beautiful Bill Act Congress passed last year, gamblers can no longer fully offset their losses against their winnings. <\/p>\n

Starting with the 2026 tax year, only 90% of gambling losses are deductible against winnings, down from 100% before. Someone who won $100,000 and lost $100,000 in the same year could once wipe out the tax bill entirely; now the same break-even year leaves $10,000 of taxable \u201cphantom income.\u201d That means even a perfectly documented, perfectly legitimate loss now shields less of a winner\u2019s tax bill than it used to.<\/p>\n

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The revenue Congress expects to raise by tightening the loss-deduction rules is modest: the Joint Committee on Taxation projects the recently passed 90% cap will bring in only about $1.1 billion over 10 years.<\/p>\n

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If you’re looking to offset taxes on your gambling earnings, purchasing thousands of dollars worth of losing lottery tickets on eBay may be lucrative.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5310,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[319],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-taxes"],"yoast_head":"\nSome gamblers are buying losing lottery tickets on eBay as a way offset taxes on their gambling wins - Cross Country Moving Team<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=5311\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Some gamblers are buying losing lottery tickets on eBay as a way offset taxes on their gambling wins - 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