Imagine winning the lottery not just once, but over and over again. That’s exactly what Romanian-Australian economist Stefan Mandel and his small team accomplished in the 1990s.
But this wasn’t just luck. Mandel had a system, a strategy that he used to win lotteries in Romania, and then used the money to make his way to Australia.
The odds of winning the lottery are incredibly low. For example, the chances of winning the EuroMillions jackpot with just one ticket are 1 in 139,838,160. Even if you double your chances by buying another ticket, you still only have a 2 in 139,838,160 chance of winning.
Mandel, however, noticed something interesting. In certain lotteries, the jackpot prize would sometimes exceed the cost of buying every possible combination of numbers. This meant that if you could afford to buy every combination, you were almost guaranteed a return on your investment (assuming no one else won with the same numbers).
So that’s exactly what Mandel decided to do. He convinced investors to buy into his scheme, and then figured out a way to purchase every possible combination of numbers in the lotteries they entered. This required creating algorithms to generate and print the tickets.
Once the tickets were printed, the team waited for a jackpot big enough to make their investment worthwhile. When the time came, they purchased the tickets in bulk. However, not everything went smoothly, as they faced challenges in Virginia.
Mandel had been successful in smaller lotteries in Australia, but he saw an opportunity in the US. The Virginia lottery used a smaller range of numbers, making it easier to buy every combination. When the jackpot reached $15.5 million, Mandel’s team went all in.
After two days of purchases, they had bought 6.4 million of the 7 million combinations needed to guarantee a win. And they did it. They had the winning ticket among their pile of losing tickets.
Despite being investigated by the FBI and CIA, Mandel was found to have done nothing wrong. In total, he won 14 different lotteries, earning millions of pounds for himself and his investors. He eventually retired to a beach house on the tropical islands of Vanuatu.
