How an American pensioner cheated a lottery and became a millionaire

A long but incredibly interesting story about an American pensioner who revealed a loophole in the lottery of Michigan and then in Massachusetts, which allowed him to win 9 million dollars over 27 years. All that turned out to be necessary is free time and free money, which, under certain conditions, brought almost guaranteed results.

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In the United States, they love to play lotteries: for a year, Americans spend billions of dollars on 80 tickets, while going to the movies - just 11. Not surprisingly, there are those who are trying to deceive the system. "Lenta.ru" tells the story of a resourceful retiree, who became a millionaire thanks to ingenuity.

Crisp Cipher

Gerald Selby always had a love for mathematics and riddles. At school, the boy's talents were not noticed for a long time, moreover, they considered him to be lagging behind because of dyslexia, which prevented him from reading and writing normally. However, in 14 years the test showed that Jerry is able to solve problems at the level of freshman mathematical colleges. He graduated from school without any special regalia, he married the beautiful classmate Marge and went to work as a material expert in a factory for the production of cereals. Its main task was to extend the shelf life of the flakes and come up with a package in which they would remain dry and crispy as long as possible.

Jerry daily compared the flakes of his manufacturer and their main competitor - dried and heated them, and then weighed, comparing the level of moisture. The work was not very interesting, so one day, out of boredom, he became interested in a set of numbers that competitors printed on the bottom of the package. The cipher did not indicate the time and region of manufacture, and Jerry began to look for what unites the numbers.

He spent several days at the store comparing packings, and eventually realized how the cipher works, having the opportunity to track the production of competitors almost to a specific spikelet. Unfortunately, managers did not appreciate the discovery of a young man: yet he worked in the production of flakes, not cars or airplanes. But he was proud to reveal this little secret.

Then Jerry changed quite a few positions in the factory: from chemist to packaging designer, from programmer to shift supervisor. And all this time he was constantly studying: he went to evening courses and to the library. Each time he plunged into his interests with his head and fascinated by this the whole family. During the period of mycology hobby, Jerry and his six children searched for morels in the nearby forests, and when he caught fire in geology, the whole family went hiking in search of fossils.

When the eldest son, Doug, entered senior school, his father asked him to help with a new crazy idea: he bought coins from banks at face value and checked whether numismatic rarities were among them by mistake. They spent five hours picking up five-cent coins in front of the TV and eventually earned about six thousand dollars on this.

“If he was fond of something, then rushed into it with a head. If he suddenly became interested in string theory and black holes, you did not have time to blink an eye how all these books of Stephen Hawking lay around, ”the son said.

Money from the air

Over time, Jerry and his wife Marge moved to the small town of Evart in Michigan, where about two thousand Americans lived. He had been thinking about buying a small shop for a long time, he carefully studied all the proposals and concluded that the Evart is an ideal place. Their shop on the main street was soon visited by all the inhabitants of the town: the husband was engaged in buying cigarettes and alcohol, and the wife had goods on the shelves, led the accounts department and placed on the cashier small impulsive purchases like sweets. They worked from seven in the morning until midnight, even on Christmas Day.

At one point, he installed a lottery machine in the shop, the only one in the city and one of the few in the county. Everybody played: one of the regular customers, whom he and his wife called “six packs of cigarettes,” had to be renamed “six packs of cigarettes and five tickets”. Soon, Selby began selling tickets for about 300 thousand dollars a year and received 20 thousand dollars from this amount.

Selby did not drink, did not smoke and almost did not play the lottery: Jerry only occasionally allowed himself to buy a couple of tickets. The lottery machine attracted customers to them, with the help of it they earned money to build an extension for the store and hire another employee. “It was easy money,” Jerry admitted, but the family spent it wisely: they were able to pay for their higher education to all six children.

First steps

In the 2000 year, when their children grew up and separated, Selby decided to retire. And three years later, when Jerry was 64, he finally found the mystery to match. Once in the store he was handed a brochure with a description of the lottery, in which it was proposed to guess the sequence of numbers. At that moment, as in the case of a box of cereal, something clicked in the man’s head. He realized how he could earn millions, but had no idea what consequences this would lead to.

The lottery was called Winfall. The player bought a ticket for one dollar and entered six numbers in it: from 1 to 49. Those who guessed all six, relied jackpot at least two million dollars. A smaller win could go to those who guessed five, four, three and two numbers. But what Jerry especially liked was the Roll-Down concept: if the jackpot remained unresolved, then about six times all the money was distributed to other winners: most of them got five numbers, fewer than those who managed to recognize four numbers, and so on. . After examining the conditions and the amount of winnings, Jerry realized that in the week of roll-down one dollar spent on tickets mathematically corresponds to a larger amount, as the prizes increase about ten times.

Jerry was excited about the idea of ​​making money on lotteries, but did not know how his wife would react to this venture. She was always pragmatic and more than once she lowered her husband from heaven to earth, and also believed that money can be earned only through hard work.

He realized that he would need iron evidence, but for now he himself didn’t believe that he managed to notice in a couple of minutes a loophole that hundreds of lottery employees overlooked. Therefore, he decided to test the hypothesis secretly from his wife: for the first time he did not buy tickets and made calculations, comparing his results with real wins.

After a month, he decided to try the method in practice. He went to a nearby town to avoid answering the awkward questions of acquaintances, and spent 2200 dollars on tickets, each time allowing the computer to make a selection of winning numbers for it. A few days later, he calculated all the matches (he was able to guess two, three and four numbers) and got a win in 2150 dollars, remaining in a small loss. He did not tell the authorities about this loophole: Jerry was sure that they were already in the know, and simply used it to make people buy more tickets.

Jerry was not upset and concluded that he simply put in too little money, and thus the chances of winning did not equal the odds of losing. The next time he bought tickets for 3400 dollars. It was not easy to sort them out - especially since he did it right in the store so that Marge would not catch him playing. But the pain in his eyes was worth it: he won 6300 dollars, that is, he got 46 percent of profit. The next time he spent 8 thousand dollars on tickets and won 15700 dollars.

LLC "Horn and hooves"

Jerry decided yet to confess to his wife during a picnic with friends. He said he plays the lottery, but he knows how to win. He has a system, and he has already won five-figure sums. Marge said nothing, and then smiled, knowing her husband's love for mathematical puzzles. Since then, she printed tickets with him: they came to the shops in the morning and printed thousands of tickets for hours. Owners of local shops knew the couple and did not interfere with their hobby, and they ignored questions of idle onlookers.

Then they sorted tickets into stacks worth five thousand dollars and in turn laid out tickets throughout the living room in front of the TV. They sorted dozens, and sometimes hundreds of thousands of tickets and sorted by the number of winning numbers (two to five). Then they repeated the procedure again to make sure that they did not miss anything. "It looked very tedious and boring, but they treated it quite differently. They were so trained that they spent less than a second on the ticket, "says their daughter, Donna. Several times she tried to help them, but each time she gave up: for the time she checked one ticket, each of the parents had time to check ten.

At first the children decided that Jerry had gone mad. "Dad repeated that this is a school-level mathematics, but I always had a bad time with math, so I did not understand anything," admitted Donna. But her parents sincerely took pleasure in what was happening and missed the weeks when there was no roll-down.

But soon the children joined the father’s strange passion. He noted that companies are often allowed to play lotteries, and decided that the state literally pushes people to play in groups and make big bets.

Six months after the first win, he persuaded all six children to play with him. The first time they put 18 thousand dollars and lost almost all the money, because someone guessed all six numbers and hit the jackpot. But Jerry was able to convince the family to repeat the idea and after a couple of times they all won.

Soon, Jerry created the company and chose the most boring name for it: GS Investment Strategies LLC. He sold shares on 500 dollars to children, friends and acquaintances: as a result, there were about 25 people on the list of shareholders (and in fact, players). The company existed only on paper - in reports in which Jerry indicated how much money was spent on tickets, how much was the gain, and how many taxes he had to pay. The only task of this legal entity was to play the lottery.

Business went uphill: to 2005 year GS Investment Strategies LLC 12 survived weeks of roll-out, and the stakes increased along with the winnings. At first they won 40 thousands, then 80, then 160 ... Marge kept savings on a savings account, Jerry bought a new car and a camping trailer. Soon he began to buy gold and silver in coins in order to have reserves in case of inflation and the financial crisis.

Competition in Massachusetts

But in May 2005 of the year Winfall was closed without warning. The authorities attributed this to a slump in ticket sales. Jerry, like his entire family, was very upset. But the sadness did not last long: one of the participants in their lottery group discovered a similar game in Massachusetts. Some conditions were different, for example, a ticket cost 2 dollars, not 1, you could choose numbers from 1 to 46, and roll-down was announced when the jackpot reached two million.

Jerry realized that he could return to his hobby again, the only problem was that Massachusetts was 700 miles from Ewart. There he had no acquaintances, and the sellers would hardly have allowed them to stand and print tickets for hours. Nevertheless, he took a chance and went there, still not knowing that he would have to deal with competitors.

An MIT student was going to cross the road to an ingenious old man named James Harvey. For the training project, he studied all the US lotteries, comparing which one was most likely to win. Of course, he could not miss the Massachusetts version Winfall, rightly concluding that in the week of roll-down 2 dollar per ticket are much more expensive in terms of mathematics.

Over the course of a few days, Harvey had managed to convince students around 50 to chip in on 20 dollars to buy 500 tickets for 1000 dollars. In the end, they won 3 thousands, and everyone was able to win back the money and get extra 40 dollars.

Favorable conditions attracted not only them, but also biomedical Ying Zhang. He began to study the lottery after arguing with friends that it was impossible to win them. However, the loophole in Winfall made him reconsider his views so that he soon quit his job and founded his own gaming club. They bought 300-500 tickets for thousands of dollars, and he kept them in boxes in the attic until one day they broke the ceiling.

In the meantime, tech students organized a pseudo company. Random Strategies LLC, Which shareholders were about 50 people, among whom were professors. Every time during the week of roll-downs, they bought tickets for 600 thousand dollars. Unlike the old man Selby, they did not trust the input of numbers to the computer, but did this manually to avoid repetitions. This increased the likelihood of winning, but the students sat for weeks on end and manually filled out lottery tickets.

But Selby, too, did not waste time: an elderly couple came to Massachusetts during each roll-down rally. A week before the roll-down, they started typing tickets on 5: 30 mornings and finished on 6: 00 evenings. After publishing the winning combination, they spent the whole day sorting out tickets at the hotel. To sort out tickets for 70 thousand dollars, they had to work 10 days for 10 hours. They left the room just to have lunch. Then they cashed out the winnings and drove home, taking all the losing tickets. They hid them in plastic sheds in a barn, and the raccoons, whom they had planned for, in case of anything, lowered to tax auditors, lived there.

So they lived for the next five years. Jerry did not think he was doing something illegal. Once a police officer called on them following a complaint from neighbors, but also found no violations in their actions. Despite the fact that Selby was turned over by millions, they couldn’t even think of overspending and living to the fullest. They lived in the same house, drove in an old car, and Marge continued to wash the dishes with her hands and did not even realize that you could buy a dishwasher or hire a housekeeper. Money was spent on the education of grandchildren.

Beginning of the End

Shareholders idolized Jerry's resourcefulness, but they constantly asked him how much he was going to keep playing. For all time, the group has lost money only three times: most of all in 2007 year, when they lost at 360 thousand dollars because of a correctly guessed jackpot. But literally on the next roll-down, the company Jerry recouped. Jerry claimed that he was going to "milk this cow, while she has milk."

However, competitors were not asleep, and once the tech students realized that their incomes had ceased to grow due to the fact that the gain was divided between the three groups. Then Harvey decided to pour in such a lot of money in the lottery to artificially roll-down without giving the competitors time to buy tickets. When the jackpot was 1,6 million dollars, his group put 1,4 million into the lottery, and that was more than enough for an unscheduled roll-down. The rest did not have time to react, and he received more than 700 thousand dollars of benefits.

Of course, the lottery employees could not overlook the abnormal jump in rates and guessed what exactly happened. However, instead of imposing fines, they simply upgraded the system to report abnormally large stakes, and they had the opportunity to warn the rest of the players.

When Jerry found out about what had happened, he was furious. He swore he would not let himself be deceived next time. So on the eve of Christmas alone went to Massachusetts, where he managed to print tickets for 45 thousand dollars per day. When he printed the last, there was a knock at the door. It was a representative of techies. He offered Selby to cooperate and play roll-downs in turn, but the old man refused, thinking it unethical. At that time, the tech students again repeated the old trick, the warning system did not work, and on time, worried Jerry received 200 thousand dollars of benefits.

Journalist Edition Boston Globe Andrea Estes noticed that something was wrong with the lottery in 2011 year. She carefully examined the lists of constantly winning, and found and techies, and biomedical, and Selby. No one began to talk to her, and she had to turn to the authorities. “They perfectly understood what was happening, but they made round eyes when I told them about it.” However, the actions of the journalist had consequences: 7 stores that sold too many tickets were closed.

But this was not enough for her, and she issued a sensational investigation in which she exposed all the gaming groups as villains. She accused them of taking away the money of single players and depriving them of a chance to win. "Players in the lottery have the right to expect that their money will go to the benefit of the state, and not into the pockets of the rich who invented how to deceive the system," Estes wrote. Jerry was very upset, because he did not consider himself a liar. In addition, part of the money they paid really went to the needs of the state. To abandon the game was not easy: they tried to find another store owner who agreed to open tickets for them unlimitedly. But he called the police. And Jerry had to explain that he was a law-abiding businessman who pays taxes. Guardians of the order laughed and dismissed him.

In just 8 years, the company has played 55 times: 12 - in Michigan and 43 - in Massachusetts. In total, they bought tickets for 19,1 million dollars, won 26,85 million dollars, and their net income was 7,75 million dollars.

As a result of the investigation, all game groups were found guilty only of minor violations, such as printing tickets at the time prohibited for sale. The police concluded that their activity had no effect on the chances of single players to win, but manic persistence led to the replenishment of the state budget for 120 million dollars for 7 years.

Today in his 79 years Jerry continues to play in the lottery, however, without much success. Sometimes he even goes to the casino with his wife, but she does not spend a cent for the whole evening. They invested their money in a construction company that builds housing for veterans. Selby still meet with their past "shareholders" at joint breakfasts once a month and recall with pleasure the days of their former glory. 80-year-old Marge always grumbles that she knew that luck will not last forever. But still recognizes that without the constant printing of tickets and the search for winning combinations in her life, something important was missing. "I really miss. Still, I'm too young to quit my job, "she says pensively, sending a pancake stuffed with sugar.

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