Winning the lottery is one of those things that almost everyone would love to make happen, but something we also accept is super unlikely.

Especially if you never play the lottery.

This guy, though, is using basic math to turn the odds at least a little bit in his favor.

The chance of you winning the EuroMillions jackpot using just pure luck are pretty low – like, 1 in 140 million. So, even if you buy more than one ticket, the odds never really bend in your favor.

So how did Romanian-Australian economist Stefan Mandel win the lottery multiple times?

It all started with a system, and money that he used to bribe some officials along the way.

And what he did was so simple that Australia actually had to pass laws to make sure he never won with his method again!

He bought up every possible combination of numbers, virtually guaranteeing a return on his investment, since the jackpot was 3x more money than it cost to buy all of those tickets to begin with.

It’s not as easy as it sounds.

He needed investors with deep pockets because it cost a lot of money to buy up all those tickets. Then, he needed an algorithm to generate the millions of different combinations.

When the jackpot got big enough, he would send his team out to buy tickets with the agreed-upon numbers.

In the US, he targeted Virginia, where only the numbers 1-44 were used. That meant he only had to buy 7,059,052 tickets. If they won the $15.5 million prize, they would more than double their investment overnight.

Spoiler alert… they won.

The winnings were investigated by the FBI and CIA, but no wrongdoing was found.

Across the globe, Mandel and his team won 14 lotteries worth millions of dollars.

I won’t say it was easy money, but it was faster than working yourself to the bone for 30+ years to scrape by on a government retirement.

Just saying.