French Dip: Must a Lottery-Winning Card Thief Share with His Victim?

Adapted from the writings of Dayan Yitzhak Grossman

February 27, 2025

The Associated Press reports:

Thieves used a stolen card to buy a winning French lottery ticket worth 500,000 euros ($523,000). But they vanished before cashing in—and now they’re among France’s most famous fugitives.

The man whose card was stolen, identified in police documents as Jean-David E., is offering to split the cash with the lucky winners. He wants his wallet back, too.

The thieves, meanwhile, face the risk of arrest. As of Saturday, the state lottery operator La Française des Jeux, or FDJ, said that no one had submitted the ticket to cash out.

“It’s an incredible story, but it’s all true,” Jean-David’s lawyer, Pierre Debuisson, told The Associated Press on Saturday. Jean-David discovered earlier this month that his backpack had been stolen from his car in the southern city of Toulouse, including bank cards and other documents, the lawyer said. Jean-David asked his bank to block the card and learned it had already been used in a local shop. At the shop, a vendor told him two apparently homeless men had used one of his cards to buy the winning scratch-off lottery ticket. “They were so totally happy that they forgot their cigarettes and their belongings and walked out like crazy people,” Debuisson said.

Jean-David filed a police complaint about the theft, but he is ready to withdraw it if the thieves come forward so that they can share the money, Debuisson said. “Without them, no one would have won,” Jean-David said on public broadcaster France-2. Prosecutors may try to seize the winnings, considering them illegally obtained gains, the lawyer said.

The lawyer launched a national appeal Thursday asking the perpetrators to contact his office to make a deal. “You risk nothing…we will share with you,” he said. “And you would be able to change your lives.” The ticket will eventually expire, he warned. “Time is working against us,” he said.[1]

This basic scenario was analyzed seven years ago by R’ Moshe Meir Aviner, with the important difference that the theft was of cash rather than bank cards. He ruled as follows:

A thief who purchases an item with stolen money: If there was yeiush (despair by the victim of recovering what was stolen) before he purchased it, the thief is entitled to the purchased item. If there was no yeiush, then according to the Sha’ar Mishpat, the sale is effective if the seller did not know the money was stolen, and according to the Chazon Ish, the sale is void. The victim of the theft is certainly not entitled to a share of the profit.[2]

Rav Aviner’s statement that something bought with stolen money after yeiush belongs to the thief is based on the principle that a thief who transfers stolen property to another acquires it thereby, via the combination of yeiush and shinui reshus (change of possession). As the Rambam and Shulchan Aruch rule:

If the owner despairs of the stolen item’s return, whether he despaired and afterward the thief sold the item or he despaired after the thief sold it,[3] the purchaser acquires the item via despair and change of possession, so he need not return to the owner the stolen item itself but its value—provided he bought it from a well-known thief. If the seller was not a well-known thief, the purchaser needn’t return either the item or its value, in order to remedy the marketplace (i.e., to protect innocent purchasers).[4]

If the thief acquires the stolen cash by transferring it to someone else, anything he buys with that cash is his as well, as the Rambam and Shulchan Aruch indeed rule in the context of marriage (kidushin):

One who marries a woman with an item he robbed, stole, or forced the owner to sell: If the owner despaired of the item’s return, and it is known that the thief acquired the item via that despair, she is married; if not, she is not married.[5]

The French case, however, is very different from Rav Aviner’s: In it, the thieves stole the physical bank card from the victim, but they did not purchase the lottery ticket by exchanging the card for the ticket, but by the larcenous misuse of its function as a payment card. The proper understanding of such a theft—was the money stolen from the cardholder, his bank, the store’s bank, or the store?—and the application thereto of the rules of yeiush, are complex and subtle questions and beyond the scope of this article.

Rav Aviner noted that a purchase made with stolen money in the absence of yeiush is effective according to the Sha’ar Mishpat but void according to the Chazon Ish. This is based on their differing understandings of the logic behind a halacha (accepted by many, if not necessarily all, poskim): A shliach (agent) who steals money entrusted to him and uses it to purchase something for himself does indeed own the item, at least if he bought something other than what he was sent to buy.[6] While the shliach’s transfer of the money to the seller constitutes shinui reshus, there is no yeiush in this case, and as we saw earlier, a thief only becomes the owner of what he stole with a combination of both. So how does the shliach own the item he bought with money he stole?

The Sha’ar Mishpat offers two explanations:

• Even if the shliach does not gain ownership of the principal’s money, he does own personal property (metaltelin) he buys with it by taking physical possession of the item (kinyan meshichah).
• Even with respect to real property (karka)—for which the buyer must transfer his money to the seller (kinyan kessef) in order to acquire title—since a seller who had no reason to think the buyer was using stolen money need not return it to the victim due to takanas hashuk, that money can be used to perform a kinyan kessef.[7]

These approaches apply equally to a non-shliach thief who purchases an item with stolen money. So even where the thief doesn’t own the money he stole because there was no yeiush, he will still own what he buys with that money.

As cited above, Rav Aviner rules that “If there was no yeiush, then according to the Sha’ar Mishpat, the sale is effective if the seller did not know the money was stolen.” The Sha’ar Mishpat’s second approach is indeed predicated on the seller not knowing the money was stolen. But his first approach involves no such condition, so the Sha’ar Mishpat would presumably maintain that a thief who purchases metaltelin with stolen money owns them even if the seller knew the money was stolen. The question of whether lottery tickets are considered metaltelin or shtaros (financial instruments), with its implications regarding whether a thief who buys a lottery ticket with stolen money owns it according to the Sha’ar Mishpat, is beyond the scope of this article.[8]

In any event, the halacha that a shliach sent to buy something who steals the money and buys something else for himself owns it is explained by the Chazon Ish in other ways that would not apply to a non-shliach thief who buys something with stolen money, so according to the Chazon Ish, such a thief would apparently

[1]Thieves used a stolen card to buy a $523,000 lottery ticket. The victim wants to share the winnings. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/france-lottery-ticket-stolen-card-thieves-50a0fa5a3fb22baac08899e5100dc1db.

[2]R’ Moshe Meir Aviner, Ganav Kessef Vezachah Behagralah, Asar Yeshivah–She’al Ess Harav.

[3]Some disagree and maintain that the yeiush must precede the shinui reshus–see Tur, Bais Yosef, Shulchan Aruch, and Hagahos HaRama C.M. 353:3.

[4]Hilchos Geneivah 5:3 and Shulchan Aruch ibid.

[5]Hilchos Ishus 5:7 and Shulchan Aruch E.H. 28:1.

[6]See Hagahos HaRama C.M. 183:3; Sma ibid. s.k. 6; Shach ibid. s.k. 5; Nesivos Hamishpat Biurim s.k. 4. Cf. Taz ibid.; Minchas Pitim ibid.

[7]Sha’ar Mishpat siman 190 s.k. 1.

[8]See She’eilas Ya’avetz cheilek 1 end of siman 85 s.v. Mikol makom zachinu ledin.