Lottery winner explains the basic maths which saw him win 14 jackpots

It’s common knowledge these days that the odds of someone winning the lottery are pretty miniscule. An often-cited statistic is that you’re more likely to be struck by lightning and die than choose the lucky ticket.

When there are millions of possible combinations for a lottery ticket then, well, you’d need to buy a lot of lottery tickets if you want to be in with a good chance of taking home the jackpot.

And that’s exactly what one Romanian economist named Stefan Mandel did, with the help of investors and a syndicate – named the International Lotto Fund or ILF - which saw them win a total of 14 lotteries around the world.

In an interview available on YouTube, Mandel explained: “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.

“We were the only winners and that was it.”

Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter

Eventually, Mandel targeted a lottery in Virginia, where the rules around picking six numbers between one and 44 meant they only had 7,059,052 – apparently, this was a good thing.

You have more of a chance winning the Conservatives' lottery, if you wanted to take part in that for some reason.

What was also a good thing was that Virginia allowed individuals to purchase tickets and print them at home, making it a lot less inconvenient and awkward than doing it at a cashier – they only needed 30 computers.

It was in February 1992 that his syndicate went for a jackpot of $27m, and because they had done every ticket imaginable, they scooped up $900k in additional prizes for the tickets which placed second, third, fourth and so on.

14 international agencies investigated him and the ILF – including the CIA and FBI – but both were cleared of any wrongdoing.

And where is Mandel now? Well, according to The Hustle, he’s apparently spending his days in a beach house on a remote island off the coast of Australia.

Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.