A savvy bloke claims he managed to win the lottery 14 times using an ingeniously simple trick that caught the attention of American law enforcement agencies.
Romanian-Australian mathematician Stefan Mandel has made millions of dollars in lottery wins simply by being clever enough to realise that buying every single ticket in a lottery would not only guarantee a win, but also quickly cover the initial investment needed to win.
He spent the 1980s and 1990s travelling the world making millions of dollars using the crack system, first using it in his native Romania, where he was trying to save enough money to leave the Soviet Union,news.com.au reports.
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Stefan, now 89, would convince several investors of the surety of his plan, before writing algorithms that would generate and print lotto tickets, which some lotteries allowed people to do at the time.
Tickets in hand, he and his team would simply go to stores and buy the tickets.
After cleaning up a dozen lotteries in Australia, he then moved to the US to see if he could take on the home of the world’s biggest lotto wins.
Moving to Virginia for its state lottery, he convinced a group of investors to pump millions into his latest scheme, which would win them a whopping £15.5million.
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But at the last minute, several investors pulled their cash out, leaving Stefan and the rest of his team with just 6.4 million of the 7 million tickets.
This put their plan in jeopardy, as the win was no longer guaranteed.
Luckily, the odds were still in their favour and they won the lottery.
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The Virginia scheme was so lucrative that both the FBI and CIA ended up investigating Stefan for potential wrongdoing, but found nothing.
While Virginia paid out his winnings, it and other states have since changed their lottery rules to prevent anyone else from doing what Stefan and his team did.
Stefan disbanded his team and retired to a beach house on the tropical Pacific Ocean island of Vanuatu, where he still lives.
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