How a rogue Romanian economist legally gamed the lottery and won millions of dollars around the world.
Just after 11 PM on February 15, 1992, a janky ball machine at the Virginia State Lottery HQ spit out 6 winning numbers on live television: 8… 11… 13… 15… 19… 20.
In the coming days, officials would find out that one “person” had secured not only the $27,036,142 jackpot, but 6 second prizes, 132 third prizes, and 135 minor prizes collectively worth another $900k.
What unfolded next was the strangest, most improbable lottery tale in history — one involving thousands of international investors, dozens of complex computer systems, and a mathematical savant who’d masterminded the entire operation from the other side of the world.
This is the story of the man who “gamed” the lottery by buying every possible combination.
In the late 1960s, a young Romanian economist named Stefan Mandel was struggling to get by.
At the time, Romania was under oppressive Communist rule, a period marred by poverty, job and food shortages, and “profound misery.” Mandel’s salary of 360 lei (US $88) a month was not enough to support his wife and two children, and, as he later told Planet Money, he needed a way to “get some serious money, quickly.”....MUCH MORE
Many Romanians in Mandel’s predicament had, out of necessity, turned to lives of crime. But Mandel, a self-described “philosopher-mathematician,” saw another way out: The lottery....
