There have been several new posts in this thread since I jotted the following down on a Notepad document. Instead of addressing/quoting each post I wanted to reply to, this will do instead.
As I commented about earlier in this thread, I did a search for "lottery winners killed" and found only a few cases. The most publicized case was Abraham Shakespeare, killed by a friend and roommate, Jeffrey Dampier, killed by his sister-in-law and her boyfriend and Urooj Khan, whose death was initially ruled from natural causes, but tests later showed he had a lethal amount of cyanide in his body. The investigation is still ongoing, but my money is on his widow (who prepared the last meal he ate) being the culprit. I also think that, since Khan was a successful businessman with multiple holdings, the lottery win was just the icing on the cake, perhaps the impetus for the (alleged) murder, but not totally to blame.
If you want to argue that "strangers" have indeed killed lottery winners, I'll tentatively stipulate to the case of Arthur Neal, the elderly Detroit man who went missing after being thought to have won $20k and was later found stabbed to death, then you would also have to admit that's a place where people have been killed for their Air Jordan sneakers. (or over drugs or for wearing the wrong colors or for much lesser amounts of money or for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time) There's something peculiar about that particular case, in that it was Neal's family who said he had won the lottery, but the Michigan Lottery says no winning ticket was ever cashed. Mike Payne, who described himself as Neal’s best friend, said he hadn’t heard of any lottery winnings. “I spent every day with him, and I would think he’d have told me,” said Payne, 65, who worked construction jobs with Neal. Payne described Neal as a “nice guy who also made some enemies. He was kind of strange; he used to hide cash in his house, but it wouldn’t be in places you’d think. He’d have money in the trash can, or in the barbecue grill. He was an interesting character.” (source) So, there's no proof he was killed because he was a lottery winner, nor has there been any proof he WAS a lottery winner.
I will admit there's definitely been one murder for lottery winnings by a stranger, the Graeme Thorne kidnapping and subsequent murder in Australia, a half-century ago and a half-world away. While tragic, it was a case where some "common sense" used could have prevented it...and that same "common sense" will go a long way towards protecting you, be it after a lottery win or with preventing identity theft. (which is nothing more than a red herring in regards to this discussion on lottery winners being murdered)
So, there's a few cases of lottery winners being murdered for their winnings and the results show it's a very rare thing indeed and that you're much more likely to be murdered by family or friends after you win the lottery than by a stranger. Govt. fraud and corruption, on the other hand, is well documented and in no way can be attributed to paranoid thinking. We need to have transparency whenever the government is involved...that is, unless you're in favor of a nanny state and are mind-boggling naive enough to believe everything the govt. tells you.