Australian man won lotto 14 times using basic maths

You’re more likely to be hit by lightning than to win the lottery — but Aussie man Stefan Mandel struck gold 14 times using very basic maths.

You’re many times more likely to be struck by lightning than to win the lottery — but Aussie man Stefan Mandel won the golden ticket 14 times using only basic maths.

The Romanian-Australian mathematician, along with a small team of investors, discovered an extraordinarily simple way to hack the system in the 1980s and ‘90s.

Mr Mandel’s first two wins were in his home country of Romania, where he was saving up to escape the then-communist country, before he cleaned up another dozen times Down Under.

Mr Mandel’s system was stunningly straightforward and relied on very little of his mathematical training. His attempts in America, though, were his downfall.

Aussie mathematician Stefan Mandel won the lottery 14 times. Picture: Stefan Mandel

Here’s how Stefan Mandel’s system worked

The odds of winning the lottery are pretty low. The odds of winning the jackpot in the Australian Powerball, for instance, are about one in 76,767,600, according to Lottoland. If you decide to double your chances by buying two tickets, the odds are still only 2 in 76,767,600.

You’ll notice, though, that if you buy enough combinations your odds will eventually reach 76,767,600 in 76,767,600. In that case, instead of a maths problem you have a logistics one: how do you get your hands on 76,767,600 tickets?

Mr Mandel clocked that, in certain lotteries, the jackpot prize was many times higher than the cost of buying up every possible combination of numbers. Assuming that he could buy every ticket, he was almost guaranteed a return on his investment (unless the winnings were split between several golden ticket-holders).

So, that’s what Mr Mandel did.

How many lotteries did Stefan Mandel win?

Though it wasn’t explicitly against the rules, buying up every ticket isn’t exactly in the spirit of the game — and it was no small feat, either.

Mr Mandel, now 82, convinced a group of investors to buy into the scheme over several years.

He created algorithms that would generate and print the millions of different ticket groups he needed, which some lotteries allowed people to do at the time.

With stacks of tickets printed and ready to go, Mr Mandel and his team simply waited for a big enough jackpot, at which point they would purchase those tickets in shops.

Mr Mandel cleaned up in about 12 smaller lotteries in Australia, before setting his sights on jackpots in the US that far outstripped anything he’d won so far.

Though he won millions of dollars throughout the scheme, it was a true case of flying too close to the sun — aiming for those massive lotteries in the US was his downfall.

Mr Mandel bought up every ticket to secure the jackpot. Picture: YouTube.

Why did Stefan Mandel stop his lottery scheme?

Of particular interest to Mr Mandel was the Virginia Lottery, which was new at the time and only used numbers 1 to 44 in its draws. That meant there were only 7,059,052 possible combinations — far fewer than the 25 million or higher that his team was used to.

When the jackpot was high enough — about US$15.5 million — Mr Mandel ordered the more than 2500 members of his syndicate to buy out the tickets in bulk.

Unfortunately for Mr Mandel, one lotto agency had a mechanical breakdown that meant it couldn’t process some of the tickets.

After two days of purchases, his group had about 6.4 million of the possible 7 million combinations needed to guarantee them the jackpot. Luckily, the odds were still in Mr Mandel’s favour and he won the Virginia Lottery, too.

Mr Mandel was investigated by the FBI, CIA, Secret Service and Interpol, but no wrongdoing was found. Virginia Lottery had no choice but to pay up.

Where is Stefan Mandel now?

Mr Mandel and his team bagged millions of dollars in the Virginia Lottery, collecting not only the jackpot but most of the smaller prizes, too.

He disbanded his team and retired to a beach house on the tropical island of Vanuatu, where he still lives.

While his scheme was legal at the time, Mr Mandel somewhat ruined the fun for the rest of us. Many countries — including the US and Australia — have since passed laws that would render his methods impossible today.

Originally published as Australian man won lotto 14 times using basic maths