Resourceful man tricked the lottery and won 14 times: what's his trick

Dreams of a jackpot and a life without poverty on the islands can become a reality if you approach the task with all pragmatism. That's exactly what Romanian-Australian economist Stefan Mandel did when he and his team of enthusiasts won the lottery many times in a row in the 1990s.

And it wasn't just luck or constantly guessing combinations of numbers. Mandel developed an entire system, as reported by Ifl Science.

Mandel calculated the odds of winning the lottery and realized that they were incredibly small. For example, the chance of winning the EuroMillions jackpot with one ticket is 1 in 139,838,160. The economist set a goal of buying as many combinations of numbers to reach the proportion of 139,838,160 to 139,838,160. Another problem arose: how to buy 139,838,160 tickets without having the means to do so?

Mandel watched lottery trends for a long time and found that in some period the winnings increased by more than three times the redemption value of each individual possible combination. He decided to take a risk, assuming that buying a combination of numbers would guarantee him a return on his investment. He had to find a bunch of enthusiastic "investors" and involve them in the scheme. Mandel created algorithms to generate and print tickets (which some lotteries allowed at the time).

After waiting for a big enough jackpot, the team would buy these tickets in stores and the scheme would work.

After the winnings in Australia, Mandel noticed lotteries in the United States whose jackpots far exceeded the amount it would cost to buy each combination. Of particular interest was the new Virginia lottery, which used only numbers from 1 to 44 in its drawings. This meant that there were 7,059,052 possible combinations, well short of the usual 25 million or more.

When the jackpot became high enough - $15.5 million - he told his team to buy up tickets in bulk. Naturally, Mandel arranged this unusual scheme in advance, but some "investors" backed out of the deal, so not all combinations went in, reducing the chances of winning.

After two days of shopping, Mandel's team purchased 6.4 million of the possible 7 million combinations needed to guarantee a win - and hit the jackpot.

The FBI and CIA took an interest in Mandel and "his young team," but found no wrongdoing. In total, Mandel won 14 different lotteries, raising millions of pounds for himself and his investors, after which he decided to retire and bought a house on the tropical islands of Vanuatu.

Previously OBOZREVATEL told that the mathematician revealed the secret of how to increase the chance of winning the lottery.

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