The Economist Who Broke the Lottery With Brute-Force Math

A Romanian economist devised a legal, brute-force system to guarantee lottery wins by buying every single ticket combination. His success, culminating in a $27 million jackpot, forced lotteries worldwide to rewrite their rules just to stop him.

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The Six-Step Formula

For most people, winning the lottery is a fantasy fueled by impossible odds and blind luck. For Stefan Mandel, it was a mathematical certainty. The Romanian-Australian economist treated lotteries not as a game of chance, but as a solvable equation. His method was audacious in its simplicity: when a jackpot grew to be significantly larger than the total cost of purchasing every possible number combination, he would simply buy them all. This wasn't a get-rich-quick scheme; it was a grueling, large-scale logistical operation he called “combinatorial condensation,” and it worked an astonishing 14 times.

An Escape from Poverty

Mandel’s journey began in the late 1960s in Communist Romania. Working as a state economist for a meager salary, he desperately sought a way to provide for his family and escape the oppressive regime. He spent years poring over mathematical theories in his spare time, eventually devising his core six-step formula. First, calculate the total number of possible combinations. Second, find lotteries where the jackpot is at least three times that number. Third, raise enough capital to buy every combination. Fourth, print millions of tickets with every combination—a logistical nightmare in itself. Fifth, deliver the tickets to authorized lottery dealers. Sixth, win the jackpot and pay your investors. His first test came with the Romanian national lottery. After persuading a syndicate of friends and acquaintances to invest, he won, netting roughly $19,000. It was enough to bribe the necessary officials and flee west, eventually settling in Australia.

Scaling the Operation

In his new home, Mandel perfected his system. He realized the most difficult part wasn’t the math, but the execution. He created a sophisticated syndicate, the International Lotto Fund, with thousands of investors from around the world. At the fund's heart was a room full of printers and computers running algorithms to generate and print every ticket combination. His team scouted lotteries across the globe, waiting for the perfect conditions. He secured multiple wins in Australia and the UK, but his ambition was growing. He set his sights on the United States, and specifically, the nascent Virginia Lottery.

The Virginia Gambit

By 1992, the Virginia lottery jackpot had swelled to an irresistible $27 million. The total number of combinations was a relatively low 7,059,052. The math checked out. Mandel activated his network. From a warehouse in Melbourne, Australia, he oversaw the printing of over 7 million tickets, which were then shipped to a ground team in Virginia led by his associate, Anithalee Alex. For two frantic days, Alex and his team of 16 couriers crisscrossed the state, attempting to purchase the millions of tickets from hundreds of gas stations and convenience stores. One major retailer got cold feet and pulled out at the last minute, leaving them short. But when the numbers were drawn on February 15, 1992, they held the winning ticket. Mandel’s syndicate had won the $27,036,000 grand prize, as well as over $900,000 in secondary prizes.

Stefan Mandel didn't just win; he engineered a victory so complete that it exposed the lottery's fundamental vulnerability: the assumption that no one would be audacious enough to buy every ticket.

The win triggered chaos. The Virginia Lottery Commission initially refused to pay, launching a multi-agency investigation that included the FBI and the CIA. They found no evidence of illegal activity. Mandel had not cheated or hacked a computer; he had simply played the game by its existing rules, albeit on an industrial scale. He was eventually forced to accept his winnings in 20 annual installments, but his victory came at a cost. His investors grew restless, and legal battles consumed his time and money. More importantly, his success was a wake-up call for lottery organizations everywhere. Australia and all 44 U.S. states with lotteries passed new laws banning the bulk buying of tickets and the use of computer-generated slips. The loopholes Mandel had so brilliantly exploited were sealed shut, one by one. After a string of other failed business ventures, he declared bankruptcy in 1995 and now reportedly lives a quiet life on a remote tropical island in Vanuatu, having gamed the system and walked away.

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