Most people fantasize about winning the lottery once. Stefan Mandel actually did it—again and again. In the 1990s, the Romanian-born, Australia-based economist pulled off something that sounds impossible on paper: he won major lottery jackpots 14 separate times. Not through luck, superstition, or “hot numbers,” but through cold, deliberate mathematics.
Mandel didn’t stumble into fortune. He engineered it. With a carefully built team of investors, programmers, and logistical planners, he approached the lottery like a solvable equation rather than a game of chance. His methods were so effective—and so unsettling—that they attracted the attention of U.S. federal agencies, including the FBI and the CIA. Investigators combed through his operations, searching for fraud, manipulation, or loopholes. They found none.
What made Mandel’s story remarkable wasn’t just the money, but the audacity of the idea itself: that a system designed to be unbeatable could, under the right conditions, be systematically conquered. This is the story of how he did it—legally, methodically, and repeatedly.
A Brilliant System, Not Lucky Numbers
Lottery jackpots are built on astronomical odds. Take EuroMillions as an example: the probability of winning the jackpot with a single ticket is 1 in 139,838,160. Buying a second ticket barely nudges those odds. But Mandel noticed something crucial—odds change dramatically when volume changes.
If you could theoretically buy every possible number combination, your odds would shift from near-zero to near-certain. At that point, the problem stops being mathematical and becomes logistical. Printing, purchasing, and processing millions of tickets is no small feat—especially before modern digital infrastructure existed.
Mandel observed that some lotteries allowed jackpots to grow so large that they exceeded the total cost of purchasing every possible combination. In those rare moments, the lottery flipped from a losing game into a profitable one—assuming the prize wasn’t split among multiple winners. Mandel decided to exploit that imbalance.
How Math Helped One Man Win the Lottery 14 Times 