Winning the lottery even once is an absolute dream of many. When you’re sat in the pub chatting about what you’d do with the money, you only imagine it being one pot of cash.
Maybe you’d splash it all out on a big holiday or move onto a cruise ship or perhaps buy a big property.
And those kinds of chats are all well and good but realistically, it’s all just dream stuff – the chances of winning aren’t exactly high. Let alone cashing in multiple times.
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Well, except for Stefan Mandel – that bloke's managed to win the lottery a whopping 14 times. But unlike others, he doesn’t base the lottery on a case of luck. Instead, he uses some easy maths to ‘beat the system’.
The Romanian mathematician came up with a genius method, leading to him and many others bagging an absolute fortune.
Teaming up with a group of investors to form a syndicate called he International Lotto Fund, Mandel targeted a series of lotteries around the world.
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In a resurfaced interview on YouTube, the economist explained his theory, which he called 'combinatorial condensation'.
"Theoretically, anybody can buy all the possible combinations," he said. "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."
So, take the lottery in Virginia in the US, for example. Mandel calculated that with players picking six numbers from one to 44, there were 7,059,052 combinations to choose from.
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And to make matters even more favourable with this particular game, players were allowed to print their play slips/coupons at home, meaning Mandel and his gang could do so without alerting suspicion - even though what they were doing was totally legal.
In February 1992, on top of the $27 million jackpot, they took home $900,000 in additional prizes for the tickets that placed second, third, fourth and so on.
This plan alerted the suspicions of the authorities, with an investigator in Australia contacting the Virginia Lottery to tell them not to pay out.
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They claimed Mandel and his syndicate were involved in money laundering, mafia. However, they found that the team had done nothing wrong.
Mandel is now said to live in Vanuatu, having 'retired from the lottery'. Speaking to Romanian newspaper Bursa back in 2012, he said: "I’m a man who takes risks, but in a calculated way.
"Trimming my beard is a lottery: There is always the possibility that I’ll cut myself, get an infection in my blood and die — but I do it anyway. The chances are in my favour."
Jess Battison