Here’s something amazing: a man managed to legally win the lottery 14 times. 14 bloody times.
I can hear the haters. ‘It’s a tax for idiots!’, ‘Better chance of copping off with a supermodel!’, ‘the odds are stacked against you!’, and ‘the lottery is categorically not my cup of tea and I haven’t, nor will I ever, buy a ticket, even at gun point!’
What if I told you I’ve personally won the lottery? I’d be lying, that’s what. But let’s hear more about the guy who pulled it off 14 times… Matron!
Romanian-Australian economist (that’ll do it!) won his first two lotteries in his native Romania in a desperate bid to get his family of the then-communist country.
At the time, his salary was a puny $88 a month. He moved to Israel and then Australia, where won the lottery to no end. Another whopping 12 times.
This is basically how he did it:
- Work out the total number of possible combinations. For exhausting scale, that is around 3,838,380 combinations.
- Get yourself a lottery where the jackpot is three times or more the number of possible combinations.
- Get together enough money to pay for each combination. Bit of a catch, that, isn’t it? Mandel himself gathered 2,524 investors in his bid to win the Virginia lottery.
- Print out millions of tickets with every combination. Can’t do this no more! Gutting. Modern life really is rubbish innit?
The rules continue:
- Deliver the crafty tickets to authorised lottery dealers.
- And finally: win the lotto baby! Pay back your investors, too. Mandel only came away with $97,000 after a $1.3 million win in 1987. Again, that’s a catch isn’t it? Where was his sense of amorality?
The practise was legal at the time. New laws in the US and Australia have rid Mandel of his craft scheme.
Today, it’s impossible to buy lottery tickets in bulk or print ones at home (duh!).
You can read Mandel’s full story in The Hustle. And remember kids, don’t try and scam your way to the way big bucks. Trust me on this one.
If you have a story you want to tell send it to UNILAD via stories@unilad.co.uk.
