I wish!
No, I have never had a big lottery win at all, so it has been all my personal time and money that have gone into the creation, growth, and constant maintenance of this site. It is a labor of love. Nothing on this site has come easy or without a high personal price.
I started it because I have always enjoyed the lottery. One day in 1999 I was searching for information on the Web about a lottery game (The Big Game, if you are wondering), and found that there was an utter lack of useful information, and no place of the quality I was looking for that could provide solid lottery information.
So by late 1999 I had created my first Web site, called BigGameLottery.com, which was dedicated to The Big Game, mostly the lottery results and some stats and rudimentary search abilities. By the end of that year I also created the most primitive form of a Lottery Post message board, but did not launch it yet.
In May 2000, I added a real home page to BigGameLottery.com, including a big news section, and gave it a real launch, treating it as the official launch. The launch was timed to the end of a huge jackpot run that was happening at the time, in which tons of people found the site simply because the name of my site matched the game's name better than the official site did.
(If you can believe it, the name of the official Big Game site was theofficialbiggame.com — dreadfully awful!)
Also in May 2000 (although "officially" in June of 2000) I launched Lottery Post as an extremely simply message board. My idea, even then, was that someday Lottery Post would be the site where I would focus the majority of my efforts, but at the time it was much easier for me to grow biggamelottery.com, as it had a great built-in audience, and I was getting pretty good at Search Engine Optimization.
At the time I also came up with with a number of really neat innovations, which are still being copied today. Jackpot Alerts were one of those innovations, and just about everyone has copied them today. (Yahoo! named BigGameLottery.com as "Useful Site of the Day" when they found out about my Jackpot Alerts. Boy did that drive a lot of traffic!)
(A few years later, another big innovation was my Jackpot Analysis page, which has also been shamelessly copied on several wanna-be sites.)
At this point I will refer you to a blog post of mine that highlights the history of Lottery Post's evolution through the years, including screen-captures during each phase of its development.
https://blogs.lotterypost.com/todd/2007/05/the-history-of-lottery-posts-home-page.htm
I have some other blog posts that deal with the technical side of creating Lottery Post on my technology blog located here:
https://blogs.lotterypost.com/speednet
I also have a personal blog page that has several entries about the site, but you'll need to wade through all of my posts about politics and other non-lottery stuff to find them:
https://blogs.lotterypost.com/todd
Finally, I have a pretty extensive interview published on Microsoft's ASP.NET AJAX Showcase (where they highlight major sites that use their AJAX technology):
http://www.asp.net/ajax/showcase/
Please keep in mind that there are some very jealous people on the Internet who start rumors like the one you have obviously heard.
Several are jealous because it is extrememly difficult to accomplish what I have, because of the enormous amount of work, dedication, and technical knowledge it takes.
There are also some angry people. In the past, some people have tried to use Lottery Post to promote their businesses, and I have had to ban them for spamming the site. So in their moments of rage and sour grapes, they have posted some very nasty messages directed at me.
I simply ignore these people as background noise, which is my suggestion for you as well. I let the site speak for itself.
If you would like to know anything else, I'd be happy to address your questions or listen to your feedback.