Guessing the correct 5 out of 6 numbers in a lotto game carries odds of about 1 in 3 million. So when 110 players from different states turned in those winning 2nd-place tickets, lottery officials immediately suspected that someone, somehow, was cheating the game. But they were all legitimate.
Finally they figured it out. Those players had all played the numbers that showed up on a fortune cookie. All of those fortune cookies came from the same manufacturer: Wonton Food in Long Island, New York.
Depending on how much they initially bet, each of those 110 people won between $100,000 and $500,000. This resulted in an additional unexpected payout of $19 million from the lottery. They keep an extra $25 million in reserve for unusual situations such as this.
It’s nice to see the house get beat once in a while.