Did you know that in 2023, a secret gambling syndicate won a $95 million lottery in Texas by buying every number combination possible? That’s right. They purchased 25.8 million lottery tickets, won, took the lump sum payout of $57.8 million, and walked away with a profit of around $32 million.
The whole wild story recently came to light thanks to an article by Joe Wallace and Katherine Sayre of the Wall Street Journal. In it, they reveal that a man named Bernard Marantelli, was behind the scheme.
Marantelli, a London banker-turned-bookmaker, and his partners in the plan, figured out that if they could get their hands on official lottery ticket-printing terminals, they could print out as many tickets as they wanted. So they flew to America, set up three locations to print the lottery tickets, bought dozens of the terminals and reams of paper, and went to work.
In 2023, Texas allowed online lottery-ticket vendors to set up shops to print tickets for their customers. They were the only customers. So, for three days, they printed 100 or more lottery tickets every second.
The entire operation was bankrolled by a Tasmanian gambler named Zeljko Ranogajec, nicknamed “The Joker.”
Over the years, Ranogajec and his partners have won hundreds of millions of dollars by applying Wall Street-style analytics to betting opportunities around the world. Like card counters at a blackjack table, they use data and math to hunt for situations ripe for flipping the house edge in their favor. Then they throw piles of money at it, betting an estimated $10 billion annually.
Lieutenant governor of Texas Dan Patrick called the gamblers’ lottery win “the biggest theft from the people of Texas in the history of Texas.” State Sen. Bob Hall said the tainted win signaled “the possibility of an organized crime ring being embedded in the Texas government.” Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the Texas Rangers to investigate, saying the state’s residents deserve “a lottery that is fair and transparent for everyone.”
However, Glenn Gelband, a New Jersey lawyer who represents the syndicate, said “all applicable laws, rules and regulations were followed.”
Since then, at least one other attempt to beat the lottery system has been tried. In December, Lotto retailers around the state received letters asking them if they would let someone “occupy your Lotto machine from store open until store close (even 24 hours a day), printing as many tickets as your vending machine has capacity.”
The Texas Lottery Commission shut that effort down by sending out a software update that limited the number of tickets a terminal could sell in a day and limiting the number of ticket-printing terminals a low-traffic lottery outlet can possess.
The post Someone Actually Won $95 Million In The Texas Lottery By Buying Every Number Combination appeared first on BroBible.
Someone Actually Won $95 Million In The Texas Lottery By Buying Every Number Combination
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