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Several years ago, while doing research for a school project, a group of MIT students realized that, for a few days every three months or so, the most reliably lucrative lottery game in the country was Massachusetts' Cash WinFall, because of a quirk in the way a jackpot was broken down into smaller prizes if there was no big winner. The math whizzes quickly discovered that buying about $100,000 in Cash WinFall tickets on those days would virtually guarantee success. Buying $600,000 worth of tickets would bring a 15%–20% return on investment, according to the New York Daily News.
When the jackpot rose to $2 million, the students bought in, dividing the prize money among group members. But they didn't stop there; they were so successful in their caper that they were eventually able to quit their day jobs and bring in investors to front the money they needed to purchase the requisite number of lottery tickets.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday June 09 2015, @07:45AM
the reason that promotional drawings specifically say that one may enter only once per visit, is that some caltech students - in the early seventies IIRC - use a lineprinter to produce a few million "reasonable facsimiles" for a McDonaldss contest. The McDonalds people were quite unhappy about it but there was nothing they could do to stop it; I recall seeing a photo of a pissed-off restaurant manager being handed a large cardboard box full of these reasonable facsimiles.
However the institute got a lot of bad press over it. The students won most of the prizes but then donated them all to charity.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]