Hey millionaire!
We all know how hard it is to win the lottery.
In fact, it is estimated that the odds of you being killed by a vending machine are
higher than the odds of becoming a jackpot winner.
I know, shocking!
Apparently, this happens to 1 in 112 million people, which is significantly more probable
than winning the lottery.
But for Stefan Mandel winning the lottery was a piece of cake.
All because he was smart enough to invent an algorithm that helped him with the lottery
not just once but fourteen times, making him a multimillionaire!
In this video, I'm going to tell you the incredible story of Stefan Mandel and how his knowledge
of mathematics helped him win the lottery in every country he had ever played in.
So, let's get to it!
Stefan Mandel was a renowned mathematician who grew up in Romania during the communist
era.
Because most of the population lived in abject poverty, there were few ways to earn money
honestly in Romania.
Unless, of course, you won the lottery.
Life under Soviet rule was incredibly hard and discouraging for the people of Romania
trying to survive the harsh conditions imposed by the Soviet government.
And like many other citizens, Mandel found himself struggling to feed his wife and two
children on a salary of just $88 per month.
There were three options for surviving communist Romania: resorting to illegal activities,
fleeing to the West, or engaging in politics.
But Stefan Mandel was not willing to commit a crime.
So he devised a way to survive in his country based on his ingenuity.
And he sure was ingenious because he proved he could invent an algorithm that a win every
time he played the lottery.
Can you imagine being that smart?
What technique do you use when trying to win the lottery?
Tell us in the comments!
Mandel saw the lottery as his ticket out of the country.
He was willing to invest as many hours as necessary to change his future.
But not even this genius would be able to predict his great success!
In the late 1950s, while working as an economist for the Romanian mining consortium, he had
the brilliant idea to beat the lottery odds.
So he began experimenting with different mathematical formulas until he found the secret that allowed
him to predict five of the six winning numbers.
Four years later, he put his winning formula into practice with three close friends.
He'd intended to win the second prize, which only required matching five numbers.
Thanks to his formula, plus a sudden stroke of luck, he matched up the sixth number as
well, and they won the jackpot.
After splitting the winnings with his friends, he made a haul of 72,783 lei, which was equivalent
to eighteen years of his salary.
But he did not stop there, as this was only the beginning of his successful career in
the lottery world.
Mandel gathered all the money and used it to escape Romania with his family.
He set out to move to Israel, where he thought he would be better received because of his
Jewish ancestry.
Unfortunately, he discovered that leaving a communist country was not as easy as he
thought since the government did not want anyone to leave the territory.
Fortunately for Mandel, he had money, and money can always work miracles.
He bribed every single official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs so that he could leave
the country safely and finally say goodbye to Romania.
After leaving his country, he settled in Israel with the money he had left.
But he and his family did not stay long.
They ended up moving to Australia, where Mandel would work on a plan to help him win the lottery
another thirteen times.
During the 1980s, Australia had a strong economy and quite affordable prices, allowing the
family to settle and obtain citizenship.
Thanks to his Australian citizenship status, Mandel started doing business in the British
Commonwealth countries, of which Australia was a part at the time.
And this gave him access to both the UK and Australian lottery systems.
However, Mandel decided to go a step beyond theory, abandoning his process for finding
the winning formula in favor of a new, more profitable strategy.
Instead of trying to predict the UK's winning combination, he devised a second, even simpler
plan.
The first step was to acquire as many tickets as possible.
That could have been really expensive, but Mandel had had enough time to plan each of
the steps that would allow him to abuse the system.
All he had to do was find enough people willing to participate in his plan.
He would gather a large group of buyers and have this crowd of people send him the tickets
they bought.
Once it was confirmed that a winning ticket was in Mandel's possession, the economist
would take the receipt and use it to claim the winnings.
Then, he would distribute the money equally to all participants.
The best part about this method is that the whole process was legal.
There was no law in Australia that prevented them from buying a large number of tickets
among a group of people and dividing the winnings equally.
To ensure the legality of his actions, Mandel decided to approach Australian lottery officials
and tell them about his plans.
However, it's likely no one took him seriously because of how far-fetched the idea sounded.
His strategy proved to be highly effective.
It led him to win the lottery twelve more times while living in Australia.
But his unusual success did not go unnoticed.
In response to Mandel's strategy, the government decided to enact numerous laws that would
stop the economist once and for all.
One of these laws made it illegal for one man to buy all the tickets in a lottery.
Still, Mandel found a solution by bringing together five partners.
When the new law didn't work, the government decided to enact a second rule that would
prevent a group of people from buying all the lottery tickets in a lottery drawing.
However, Mandel was not only good with numbers - he also had a good understanding of the
law.
He decided to start a lottery company, which allowed him to re-implement his strategy without
breaking the rules.
Eventually, the laws became so strict that Mandel found it impossible to continue running
his lottery business without committing a crime.
He was forced to make one of the wisest decisions of his career.
He simply started again in another country where the laws were more flexible to continue
to implement his strategy.
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Of course, Mandel set his sights on the United States, where no law prevented a player from
cornering the market.
However, there was one problem he had not foreseen.
There were many different lotteries that all had totally different mechanics, depending
on the state.
After carefully studying the laws and rules of each state, he set his sights on Virginia,
where there were only 7.1 million lottery number combinations.
With a price of $1 per ticket, he needed to raise about $7.1 million to buy all the lottery
combinations.
But since he always split his winnings with his investors, he didn't have that much money.
Fortunately, Mandel still retained some of his Australian connections.
He gathered the support of 2,500 investors and managed to convince them to put up $2,500,
which he used to get the plan off the ground.
And that's why, in 1992, after the Virginia lottery jackpot reached $27 million, his team
finally decided to take action.
Unlike other state lotteries, the Virginia Lottery allowed players to print their own
tickets at home.
And Mandel had some laser printers available to print the 7.1 million tickets they needed.
After paying $60,000 to cover logistics and shipping the tickets to the US, he began negotiating
with store owners in Virginia to buy tickets in bulk.
All he needed to do was pay for the tickets at the stores.
But the problem was that the convenience stores began to run out of tickets until they stopped
selling them altogether.
This happened when Mandel's team still had more than a million combinations left to buy.
The situation could have ended very badly for the economist.
But he was saved by luck... along with his six million tickets.
Mandel and his team became the holders of the only winning tickets.
They walked away with numerous prizes, including the $27 million jackpot, the second and third
prizes, and thousands of smaller prizes.
They managed to collect over $30 million - something even Mandel would not have been able to predict.
After his case became world-famous, the CIA and FBI began investigating his win.
Four years into their investigation, they discovered that everything he had done was
legal.
No one heard from Mandel again, as he decided to spend his last years in anonymity.
It is clear, however, that he is enjoying his fortune.
Today it would be virtually impossible to replicate this same trick since so many lotteries
worldwide have taken measures to stop anyone from using this technique.
They've even increased the number of possible combinations to win the grand prize to stop
people from copying Mandel.
But that doesn't mean we'll never see another lottery winner adopt a similar, restructured
method.
Stefan Mandel has taught us that even the impossible can become possible with a little
ingenuity and many hours of study.