Maths genius who hacked lottery for staggering amount of wins ended up bankrupt
A man once hacked the lottery numerous times to win an obscene amount in winnings, but his fall from grace ended up bankrupting him.
The maths genius found a way to earn cash with a sure-fire method that would win him the lottery more than a few times.
Stefan Mandel, a Romanian economist, formulated a system that would hack lotteries around the world and put thousands in his pocket - which started with the top lotto prize at the time during the 1960s, which was over £15,000 (approximately £430,000 in 2024).
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Using what he called 'simple maths', he created a 'number picking algorithm' and found in select circumstances, and printed a lottery ticket for every single outcome of a draw before delivering the tickets to authorised lottery dealers.
And since he'd have purchased every possible combination, he would win.
However, he soon ran into some issues with his method - the first being that he simply couldn't afford to buy all the tickets himself, so he formed a syndicate that could purchase more tickets together to increase their chances.
Mandel then fled his home country for Israel before moving to Melbourne, Australia with his wife and two children.
In the land Down Under, he set up a warehouse that would print seven million tickets over three months, as him and his syndicate won 14 lotteries across the world, including some in the USA.
There, he had even set up scouts that would find state lotteries with attractive jackpot winnings, as well as hundreds of smaller draws in both the UK and Australia.
The lottery expert then set up his own official company, Pacific Financial Resources, as well as a trust named the International Lotto Fund - which employed the help of investors.
While Mandel's operation and scheme were not illegal, lottery organisations eventually caught on and took action to stop him or anyone else from benefitting from the loophole in the future.
By the 1990s, the organisations had banned computer generated tickets and bulk purchasing as a whole.
Despite Mandel emerging victorious from a four year long legal battle which involved an investigation from the CIA and the FBI - of which he was acquitted of all the accusations against him - it did cause him some financial trouble.
It was this that caused him to file for bankruptcy in 1995.
He has since retired and moved to the isolated South Pacific island of Vanuatu.
Joshua Nair