How does our litigous society relate to the plausibilty of RJ's idea? RJ suggested the possibility that a clerk might buy tickets, resell them, and then try to claim the prizes for any of those tickets that happened to be winners. The vast majority of winning tickets are worth less than $600, so there's no record of who they were sold to or who claimed the prizes. Who would you sue? It varies from game to game, but for megamillions such a clerk would, on average, have to buy and resell 689,000 tickets before having a chance to claim ownership of a ticket worth more than $750. If they can sell 100 tickets per shift they could expect to win every 6,890 shifts. That's 22 years of working 6 shifts every week, without taking a vacation. And without anybody noticing.
Sure, it's possible that there are a few clerks who think that buying tickets, recording the numbers, creating proof of ownership, reselling them, checking to see if any of them won prizes, and then contacting the lottery to claim they're entitlted to the prize for a ticket they don't have is a workable strategy for collecting a prize. It's also possible that the kid next door is busy plotting to kidnap you and hold you for ransom. If you think that's anything more than an extremely remote possibility it's a paranoid delusion unless there's some very unusual reason such a belief is more realistic than it is for most of us. RJ's scenario is possible, but there are far more likely, and rational, explanations.