.webp)
There's only a handful of people each year who are thought to win the lottery, and it's likely that it'll be their only time doing so.
The chances of winning the lottery just once is reportedly one in 300 million, which works out to be around one in 292.2 million for Powerball and one in 302.6 million for Mega Millions, says NBC Bay Area.
Basically, there's more chance of you being struck by lightening than hitting the jackpot, but that doesn't stop millions of people across America from participating.
While the likes of Nick Kapoor, mathematics professor at Fairfield University in Connecticut, say there's 'no science' to picking winning the numbers, Stefan Mandel managed to work out the 'simple math' to 'hack' the lottery system.
Advert
Mandel's said to have spent years working on the theory, and ultimately formed a lottery syndicate where people pooled their money together to buy lottery tickets to increase their chances of winning.
The group went on to win $19,000, which left Mandel with just short of $4,000.
The money gave him enough to relocate from Romanian to Australia with his family.
Advert
Mandel's syndicate, called the International Lotto Fund (ILF), then went on to win the lottery a staggering 14 times.
They didn't always win the jackpot, but the group still won substantial amounts of cash over the years with their system in countries like the US, Australia, and Romania.
While Mandel's schemes weren't technically illegal - they definitely caused a lot of suspicion with authorities and various international agencies, including the CIA and the FBI who investigated him and the ILF for wrongdoing.
However, both Mandel and the ILF were ultimately cleared.
Advert
Mandel entered a years-long legal battle and, while he was acquitted for all the crimes he was accused of, the whole ordeal caused him a bunch of financial trouble.
The big-hitter ended up declaring bankruptcy in 1995, just three years after winning a $27 million jackpot prize, and went on to spend the next decade running various investment schemes.
His number-picking algorithm he called 'combinatorial condensation', which rested on the price of buying enough lottery tickets to play every possible combination being less than the jackpot prize, led the US to establish laws to ban it altogether.
Advert
The lottery rules were changed to ban punters from bulk-buying tickets as well as using computer-generated tickets, to ensure no one else could replicate Mandel's methods.
Niamh Shackleton