Joan R. Ginther, aged 63, from Texas, used to be considered one of the luckiest people on Earth, as she managed to win quite a few multi-million dollar prizes at the lotteries. However, there are few who can believe winning four big prizes at the lottery means there’s something more than just awesome luck at play here. Lottery numbers

Her first prize was worth $5.4 million. Ten years later, the woman managed to win $2 million more. A couple of years later she managed to add $3 million more to her account, while her last prize was won in the spring of 2008 and it was the biggest one yet, a massive $10 million jackpot. Someone took the time to calculate the odds and it appears that they are lower than one in a septillion (the number represented by 1 followed by 24 zeroes) and something like this should happen once in a quadrillion years. Lottery checker

Nathanial Rich, a reporter from Harper, said that he has serious doubts that the woman used nothing but luck to get her prizes. He also said that Joan R. Ginther used to be a math professor and has a PhD in statistics from Stanford University. Rich added that a professor at the Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming from the University of Nevada, Reno, told him that “”When something this unlikely happens in a casino, you arrest ‘em first and ask questions later.”

The woman managed to win all her prizes at the Texas State Lottery but she now lives in Las Vegas. Three of her prizes came from instant scratch lottery tickets which she purchased at the same store in Bishop. Lottery winning numbers

Nathanial Rich said Ginther could have used a score of ways to exploit the system, including coming up with an algorithm that can determine where a winning ticket will be placed in a scratch lottery game. He said that once Ginther managed to come up with an algorithm, it would have been a piece of cake for her to figure out where the lucky lottery tickets would be shipped. However, the inhabitants of Bishop, Texas, like to think God is behind it. Meanwhile, the Texas Lottery Commission said that they don’t suspect anything about the way Joan Ginther managed to win her prizes and she was just “born under a lucky star.”