Texas (USA) - The operation was meticulously planned and the haul runs into the millions. A group of professional gamblers has robbed the Texas state lottery of millions. The jackpot theft was apparently organized by a man known in the scene as "The Joker".

In April 2023, an anonymous player won 95 million dollars (83 million euros) in the Texas Lotto. But it was probably more than just luck , according to research by the renownedWall Street Journal and theHouston Chronicle newspaper.

The scam sounds incredibly simple: If you buy all the lottery tickets yourself, no one else can win. And that's exactly what the crooks did.

The group hired local helpers and rented cheap business premises. Then they opened small stores - on paper - and ordered dozens of terminals from the state lottery company with which they were able to produce tickets.

They then had the machines working around the clock, creating more than 100 tickets with pre-calculated combinations per second. After 72 hours, they had bought around 20 million tickets at one dollar each and hit the third largest jackpot in the history of Texas.

They did without common combinations such as "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6". The soldiers of fortune wanted the entire jackpot for themselves. In the end, the bold plan actually worked. The gamblers hit all the lucky numbers: 3, 5, 18, 29, 30 and 52.

In the end, they were able to enjoy a payout of 57.8 million dollars (50 million euros) - after deduction of taxes - handled anonymously by a service provider from the tax haven of Delaware. The entire operation probably cost just over 20 million dollars, with net profits in the millions. Legal consequences: apparently none.

According to research, the jackpot theft was organized by two Australians : Bernard Marantelli, a financial mathematics graduate, and former Deutsche Bank banker and gambling legend Zeljko Ranogajec, known as "The Joker".

Ranogajec is considered a key figure in the international gambling scene. Born in Croatia, he placed his bets all over the world: Las Vegas, Macao, the Philippines. In Australia alone, the joker is said to be responsible for six percent of turnover at the leading betting provider Tabcorb, according to the news portal"News.com.au". That would be around 450 million euros. Up to 100 analysts are said to work for him.

Observers consider the joker to be the biggest player in the world and assume that he is a multi-billionaire. But Zeljko Ranogajec is hard to catch, only very few pictures of him exist. He tries to maintain an inconspicuous profile.

Politicians were furious after the coup became public: "This is the biggest theft from the people of Texas in the history of the state," raged Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick. The millions stolen would be more than "all the bank robberies, all the railroad robberies in the Wild West, all the things that have ever been stolen".