Featured Image Credit: paulwherbert/YouTube
Topics: Money, World News
Ben Thompson
Everybody has fantasied about what they would do if they won the lottery at some point in their life.
At this rate, having enough dosh to buy a house would suit most people just fine.
But for one Romanian bloke, he didn't have to speculate - as he is one of many lottery winners.
However, what made Stefan Mandel stand out from the rest is that he won the lottery not once, not even twice, but a whopping fourteen times.
And to top it all off, the economist claims he scored his jackpot thanks to 'simple maths'.
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It's about time that came in handy for something!
With the help of a group of investors and a syndicate called the International Lotto Fund, Mandel targeted 14 lotteries around the world.
In an interview shared to YouTube, Mandel said: "Theoretically, anybody can buy all the possible combinations. Any high school boy or girl can calculate those combinations.
"Nobody has ever developed a logistical system to lodge such a large amount of play slips.
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"We were the only winners and that was it."
Targeting a lottery in the state of Virginia in the United States, Mandel estimated that they had 7,059,052 to choose from, due to state rules about picking six numbers between one and 44.
Apparently these were pretty good odds.
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Virginia also allows players to print their tickets at home, rather than purchasing them from a cashier.
With thirty computers on hand, Mandel and his team printed out every ticket imaginable.
It was in February 1992 that Mandel and his team scooped $900 thousand in additional prizes for the tickets that placed second, third, fourth and so on.
This was in addition to the $27 million jackpot prize, of course.
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Not a bad payday at all.
Fourteen international agencies, including the CIA and the FBI, investigated Mandel and the ILF for wrongdoing, but they were cleared.
Mandel would later declare bankruptcy in 1995, before spending the next decade running various investment schemes.
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One of these schemes nearly landed him with a jail sentence in Israel, but the conviction was overturned and Mandel never spent a day behind bars.
Currently, Mandel spends his time in a beach on a remote tropical island off the coast of Australia, having declared himself 'retired from the lottery'.
To this day, he has not revealed the exact algorithm that he and his team used to crack the system, telling a reporter in 1992: "That would be like Coca-Cola revealing their recipe."
If you say so.
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I'd rather be rich than know how to make Coca-Cola, but that's just me.