Can you get rich by buying a lot of lottery tickets?

Every now and then, we ordinary people like to think of one question: “Is it possible to become rich by buying lots of lottery tickets at once?” The concept is simple: Get a loan big enough to buy every lottery ticket number available in a day, once each, and you are guaranteed cash back plus extra profit. But is it really?

For normal lottery tickets, numbers run from 000000 to 999999, which gives us 1,000,000 (1 million) possible combination of numbers. Priced at 10,000 VND for each ticket, we are looking at 10,000,000,000 (10 billion VND) in ticket cost alone. With jackpot cashing in at 2 billion VND, plus all other minor prizes, the total amount of money recouped would be exactly 2,059,700,000 VND, without taxation. With the 10% tax added, this number would go way lower. A 10 billion Dong investment will come round with a 8 billion loss, which is of course an illogical strategy to get rich. If we simply do the math, the result will be obvious.

What about Vietlott? With Vietlott, unclaimed prize money is added to the next draw. Therefore, if we are patient enough, there might be a time when the total prize pool is way higher than the cost of lottery tickets. While it is mathematically correct that we could possibly buy lots and lots of Vietlott tickets and get the lump sum for ourselves, it would be a logistical and financial nightmare. For a start, as Vietlott tickets have 6 pairs of number, each with 100 (0-99) different combination of two numbers, we would have to spend 858,277,728,000,000 VND worth of ticket to get every single possible combination of six 2-digit numbers. Furthermore, as Vietlott tickets have to be manually chosen and printed individually, one would need to get themselves over 850 billion different tickets before the lottery draw, which translates to around 600 million tickets every minute in one day. Our worst fear, however, would be the “split pot”, in which someone else might have chosen the same jackpot number, leading to the prize being divided into two. If this were to happen, the loss would be so detrimental that even billionaire businessman would find it hard to recover from. The cake then would look as if it had a needle sticking out on its side.

Having said all that, there were cases of people actually making a profit with lottery tickets. The most notable instance is the case of Ren Xiaofeng, formerly the manager of Handan’s Agricultural Bank of China. In October 2006, Ren came up with his own plan of stealing from the bank vault. With two security guards being given a heads-up, and surveillance cameras being shut down, it was time for Ren to take action. He then gained access to the vault, taking away 200,000 yuan (around $26,000), and left the bank undetected. With all this money, Ren’s plan was to buy lots of lottery ticket in the hope of winning a prize large enough to return the missing funds, while still allowing him to pocket some for himself. Despite the plan being very stupid just from the look, plus the extremely unfavorable odds, Ren somehow won the lottery, and was able to return the money to the vault, keeping a sum of cash for himself. This amount was never published.

If Ren had stopped right here and called it a day, everything would have been alright. However, as greed is the nature of human, Ren did not. He wanted a second round, but he also wanted to go bigger than ever. The only problem was that Ren could not possible pull this off on his own, as wiping out half the vault’s money would mean that Ma Xiangjing, another manager of the branch, would be sure to notice. As a result, Ren had to convinced Ma to join forces, to which he totally agreed. With this new combined team of two, Ren and Ma stole 32.96 million yuan ($4.3 million) in March and April 2007, then went on to spend most of them on lottery tickets. This time, luck wasn’t on their side, and the duo eventually became empty-handed. In desperation, they stole a further 18 million yuan from 6 cash boxes for more tickets. It was a great time for Handan thanks to record lottery ticket sales, but a disaster for Ren and Ma. Out of all the money they stole, they were only able to recoup 98,000 yuan ($12,700). As time went on, the missing vault money was discovered, raising suspicion from everyone, and attracting unwanted attention from governmental officials. Wanted notices were distributed across the nation, and the two quickly got arrested on their escape. For what they had done, both of them received a death penalty.

Special thanks to Kento Bento for giving us lots of ideas for this post. You can check out his channel at the link below:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLOwKVD0bYHxaDZxXkK4piw