The $95 Million Texas Lottery Heist (That Was Totally Legal)

This is an absolutely bonkers story that recently ran in the Wall Street Journal. So all credit to them for the reporting — we’re only here to recap the details for you if you’re crunched for time, but we strongly recommending reading the full thing.

So how was $95 million legally “robbed” from the Texas betting lottery? Keep reading and we’ll break it down, starting with the almost-too-crazy-to-believe scheme.

The Genius Scheme To Steal The Texas Lottery

Here’s what makes the story so crazy: the element of luck was completely removed from the jackpot equation. Yes, really.

The mastermind behind the scheme — and mastermind might actually be selling him short — is Bernard Marantelli. He’s an ex-banker turned bookmaker from London.

The plan was simple: buy almost every possible number combination ahead of a draw in 2023. How, you ask? Well, the math checked out. You see, there were 25.8 million combinations at $1 a ticket and a jackpot approaching $95 million. So if a group of people could corner nearly all the tickets, the profit would be nearly $60 million after taxes.

Marantelli’s genius scheme was also buoyed by a secretive Australian gambler named Zeljko Ranogajec — also known as “The Joker”, not to be confused with the NBA betting favorite, Nikola Jokic. Ranogajec is one of the most mysterious figures in the legal betting world, a data wizard who reportedly wagers billions annually using a team of mathematicians and analysts.

The pair set up shop in Texas with a small army of assistants, operating out of a closed-down dentist’s office, a warehouse, and a few other rented spaces. They hauled in dozens of official lottery ticket machines, printing nonstop for three days straight. The machines, running around the clock, printed more than 100 tickets per second — a frenzy that state lawmakers would later compare to a “sweatshop.” By the end of the printing blitz, the team had bought 99.3% of every possible number combination in the game.

Winner Winner Chicken Dinner

On April 22, 2023, one of their tickets was the sole winner — netting them $57.8 million after taxes. That winning ticket, like all the rest, was run through Lottery.com, a struggling startup the gamblers partnered with to help print and organize the tickets. The company collected a 5% sales commission, bringing in roughly $264,000 in pure profit.

The prize was officially claimed by a Delaware-based limited partnership called Rook TX. And per state law, the winner was allowed to stay anonymous. But wins of this magnitude, well, they don’t stay secret for long. Word quickly got out, and that’s when the backlash began to mount.

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick called it “the biggest theft from the people of Texas in the history of Texas.” State senators began holding hearings, wondering how the Texas Lottery Commission allowed something like this to happen. The answer surprised everybody, as we’ll explain in the next section.

How On Earth Was The Legal (Or Was It)?

Believe it or not, the scheme was 100-percent legal. No rules were broken in the process whatsoever. Ranogajec funneled money from offshore accounts — some tied to tax havens like the Isle of Man (if you’ve never heard of this island, then you’re not alone) — to Lottery.com, which was authorized by the state to sell tickets. The lottery terminals were placed in private offices, which while unconventional, didn’t violate any policy at the time.

The plan had another key element: strategy. These weren’t just random bets. The team used data to avoid “popular” number combinations like 1-2-3-4-5-6 — the kind that would be picked by thousands of casual players and split the pot. They printed QR-coded tickets, organized them by number range, and cataloged everything so the winning ticket could be found immediately.

Sure enough, once the winning numbers were announced — 3, 5, 18, 29, 30, and 52 — Marantelli’s crew quickly located the winning slip. Photos circulated of a grinning Marantelli holding the ticket, looking like the other Joker, the Batman villain.

What Happens Now?

As you’d expect, public outrage was fast and furious once the plan became public knowledge. Dawn Nettles, a longtime lotto watchdog in Texas, filed a lawsuit alleging fraud. Lawmakers pointed fingers at the Texas Lottery Commission, asking why it allowed such a large-scale operation to happen under its nose.

The commission said the request to place the terminals had been approved by a lower-level staffer (the classic blame-the-intern excuse), and the rules at the time didn’t forbid mass ticket-buying. Still, in response, the Lottery Commission updated its systems to cap the number of tickets a terminal can print in a day. That rule, though, doesn’t mean the scheme can’t be run again.

In fact, less than a year later, another wave of interest hit Texas retailers. Store owners reported receiving letters from someone named “Adrian,” offering to occupy their lottery machines full-time to print thousands of tickets — sound familiar? Retailers were divided. Some wanted the easy business. Others reported it to the commission, which pushed a software update to shut it down.

Software update or not, we can’t imagine this situation doesn’t happen again — in Texas or elsewhere. As jackpot prizes balloon and more data becomes publicly available, professional syndicates will keep sniffing out opportunities. And unless states revamp their systems entirely, it’s only a matter of time before another “Joker” shows up and pulls off a heist — legally, of course.