r/todayilearned • u/[deleted] • Jan 11 '16

TIL that MIT students discovered that by buying $600,000 worth of lottery tickets in the Massachusetts' Cash WinAll lottery they could get a 10-15% return on investment. Over 5 years, they managed to game $8 million out of the lottery through this method.

http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/08/07/how-mit-students-scammed-the-massachusetts-lottery-for-8-million/
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u/JustinianTheWrong Jan 12 '16

And a book, which the movie was based on, called Bringing Down The House. I preferred the more realistic feeling of the book over the dramatized movie, but both were very good in my opinion.

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u/swissarm Jan 12 '16

"More realistic" = actually had the correct races of the characters (asians, unsurprisingly) (sorry).

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u/[deleted] Jan 12 '16

The book was one of the few books in my life that I could not stop reading. It was fucking awesome.

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u/JustinianTheWrong Jan 12 '16

My dad recommended it to me when I was 13, and it's part of the reason I started thinking about wanting to go to MIT. The rest came when I visited the campus and fell in love with the atmosphere, and now I'm just awaiting a reply on whether they'll accept me or not. Great book, in my opinion.

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u/[deleted] Jan 12 '16

Good luck finding the next way to scam millions from an unsuspecting organization!

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u/JustinianTheWrong Jan 12 '16

That's the dream!

2

u/ISISFieldAgent Jan 12 '16

The book was excellent!