The $30 Million Lottery Scam
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One June morning in 2017, an Albanian American real-estate broker named Viktor Gjonaj parked outside a strip mall in Sterling Heights, a small suburb on the outskirts of Detroit. He hurried past a halal-meat shop, through a waft of spices from an Indian grocery store, and into the claim office of the Michigan Lottery. Gjonaj, who is 6 foot 5, loomed over the front desk in his designer Italian shoes, his dark hair slicked back and glistening in the fluorescent light, and announced that he had won the Daily 4 lottery draw. Twice a day since 1981, the Michigan Lottery has drawn four numbered Ping-Pong balls from a plastic tank and paid up to $5,000 to any player with the same four digits on their pink ticket. But Gjonaj did not have one winning ticket. He had 500.
Skeptical lottery officials ushered him into a back office and checked his tickets carefully. Each was genuine and contained the four winning numbers—7-8-0-0—drawn on June 18. The odds of winning were just one in 416—not terribly long by lottery standards—but it was extremely unusual for someone to play the same numbers 500 times in one day. There were other red flags. Most people who present themselves at lottery claim centers are ecstatic, yet this winner waited for his prizes with the impatience of someone picking up dry cleaning. It took staff six hours to cut 500 checks for $5,000 each. Then Gjonaj (his name is pronounced Joe-nye) tucked them inside the pocket of his sports jacket and roared away in his Lincoln Navigator, richer by $2.5 million.
Over the next nine months, the 40-year-old real-estate broker would return many times, exchanging thousands of winning tickets for nearly $30 million, making him one of the biggest winners in the history of the Michigan Lottery. His luck appeared to defy the laws of statistics and probability, and sent the lottery commission into a spin. Had Gjonaj found a way to rig the machines? Or had he somehow developed a system to predict the winning combinations again and again and again?
Since he was a little boy, Viktor Gjonaj had had a head for numbers. His parents emigrated to the United States from Montenegro and spoke little English, so it was 12-year-old Viktor who handled the sale of their home in Sterling Heights, an area populated by many Yugoslavians and Albanians. As a teenager, he haggled so aggressively for a used car that the owner promised him a job at his real-estate firm. The day after Gjonaj’s 18th birthday, he became a full-time agent. “Every day, fear played a role in it,” he later said on a community television chat show. But, he added, “I knew deep down inside that I was going to figure it out. And I was going to eventually be successful.”
By the time he was in his 30s, he had become one of the busiest commercial-real-estate brokers in Detroit, negotiating deals for a gigantic Walmart and several Taco Bells and Burger Kings. Gjonaj charmed clients with meals at fine restaurants and liked to recite poetry. He was also a ruthless dealmaker who began his days before 6 a.m. and was known for his catchphrase: “People lie. Numbers don’t.”
In his relentless drive to make money, Gjonaj took risks and cut corners. He liked to “flip paper”—he’d enter into a contract to buy a $1.2 million tract of land, then quickly find a buyer to assume the purchase for $1.4 million, pocketing the difference. This wasn’t illegal, but it required nerves of steel. “He just pushed edges and boundaries that he really didn’t need to,” Randy Thomas, who employed Gjonaj in the 2000s, says. “He wanted to be the man.”
At home, Gjonaj and his wife, Rose, doted on their young daughters—together they have three, and he has a fourth from a previous relationship. To blow off steam, he
