Back in the early 90's in Ireland a 21 man syndicate was created to buy all the Lotto
combinations in order to guarantee a win. Stefan Klincewicz masterminded a Guaranteed
win on the Irish Lotto draw of the 30th of May 1992.
The Jackpot had been accumulating and Stefan had his eye on this jackpot of £1,706,046
with the addition of winning the Match 4 and Match 5 rewards also.
The task was to manually fill out all of the 1,945,792 combinations on 243,474 Lotto coupons
and also to assemble a 21 person secretive gambling crew to gamble with almost £1,000,000
with a hope of approximately 30% return. These 21 backers were to be used to placing high
value bets with low odds.
later in the week alarm bells started to ring at the Lottery offices because various Lotto terminals
around the country which would normally have only taken in £1000 work of coupons were
suddenly taking in up to 10 times their usual amount. There were also rumor's that some
newsagents where the coupons were sold were still processing more coupons after business hours.
This resulted in the Irish National Lottery shutting down some terminals.
Because of the reduced amount of terminals closer to the Saturday night Lotto draw there was
a mad rush to try and buy the final number combinations, the syndicate actually only managed
to get about 82% of the combinations on before the draw but they played a shrewd game.
They left the “least likely” number combinations until last and bought the “most likely” numbers first!
When the 6 numbers were drawn at 8pm on the Saturday evening it ended up that there were
2 other winners, 3 winners in total, another syndicate and a single ticket winner.
After splitting the Jackpot and accumulating “Match 4” and “Match 5” winning numbers
The 21 person syndicate won a total of £1,116,000 and were able to show a profit of £310,000.
And it was all legally done!
Article from the Irish Independent