To hit the lotto once is to do the unthinkable.
And getting a second win?
The odds of winning the jackpot are only 1 in 2.92 million, and winning a second time is even more unlikely.
But a few people are extremely lucky—their good fortune defies all odds, and they win huge prize money not once, but twice. Winning the lottery multiple times seems impossible, but it is surprising to know it happens more often than you think.
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In this post, we will show you the top 10 lottery winners who have won multiple times. Here’s the youtube video for you to watch:
How Can So Many People Get a Winning Ticket?
You might wonder how so many people can claim lottery winnings more than once, and the answer is more straightforward than you think.
Not everyone who wins the lottery wins a jackpot prize—sometimes, people win second-tier prizes or smaller amounts.
To maximize their chances of winning, many lottery players buy multiple tickets for the same drawing and, in some cases, enter different draws multiple times. This means that if they are lucky enough to get a winning ticket, their chances of winning more than once increase significantly.
Plus, some mega-jackpot winners have picked the same numbers for years. Although their odds of winning are the same each time, if the numbers finally come up, they could win more than once.
Top 10 Lottery Winners Who Have Won Multiple Times
It’s not impossible to pick two winning lottery tickets—here are 10 people who have done it.
10. Terry Splawn
Terry Splawn from Concord, North Carolina, is the lucky man who won a million-dollar lottery twice. He was so lucky that both times he won it at the same store. His first in was in the April of 2017 after he got a scratch-off ticket from a local store named Sam’s Mini Stop.
Splawn won his second lottery from the same store in March 2019. Even Splawn couldn’t believe his luck, as winning such bog lotteries twice is not common news. His wife made good use of the first-time winnings and used them to remodel the house. He planned on saving his second win and putting his lucky prize aside for his retirement fund.
9. Robert Hamilton
Robert Hamilton’s story was huge in 2014. His two lottery wins within three months are a memorable feat. His first lucky break happened when he bought a lottery ticket from a gas station convenience store. He won a million dollars from that first ticket.
To test his luck again, he bought another $1 million scratch-off lottery ticket from a different store. The stars aligned, and just after three months, he won a second time. His two wins fixed his financial troubles—he could pay off his house and other financial debts with the money he won.
8. Bill Morgan
Bill Morgan is also among the few lucky people who have defied the odds and won the lottery twice.
The story of this 37-year Australian truck driver is unique and heartwarming. Morgan had recently suffered a heart attack—his heart stopped beating for 14 minutes. He survived the heart attack and decided to test his luck further.
When he decided to try to play the lottery one week, he won a car alongside the winning ticket.
But one drawing wasn’t enough—the win gave him the confidence to return to the store where he bought the first ticket to buy another one. He wanted to reenact the scratching for a news station that was doing a feature on him. The second ticket also proved lucky for him, and he won AUS $250,000.
7. Calvin and Zetera Spencer
Calvin and Zetra Spencer are a Virginia-based couple who were hailed as the luckiest couple because they won the lottery not twice, but three times. Short of picking the winning numbers twice in the same day, this lucky couple is among the most unique.
Unlike other lottery winners, the most remarkable aspect of their story is that they managed to win the Virginia lottery three times.
The couple’s winning streak started on March 12, 2014, and their first win was a $1 million Powerball drawing. They tried their luck again on March 26 of that same month when they took part in a Virginia Lottery Pick 4 game that won them $50,000.
The very next day, they tried their luck a third time in a scratch-off game and won another $1 million. Encouraged by the second win, Calvin vowed to continue playing the lottery. They won $100,000 again in 2017 in Virginia Lottery Cash 5 drawing.
6. Melvyn Wilson
This winner has enjoyed the fruits of luck many times. His first serious money ticket was in 2004 when he got the prize of $50,000 from the Virginia resident’s first lottery. After a month, he won $25,000. Wilson’s luck continued, and in September of the same year, he won big: a prize of $1 million from a scratch-off.
After two years, Wilson retired from his postal service job. There was still some luck left in his arsenal, and he won another $500,000 on May 15, 2013, from a scratch-off game by Virginia’s Millionaire Mania. He was nicknamed “Mr. Lucky” because of his winning streak.
Wilson didn’t agree with his nickname as he didn’t attribute his winning to his luck. He maintains that he buys scratch-off tickets regularly, as well as US Powerball and other jackpot lotteries in the hopes of winning money another time.
5. Joan R. Ginther
Joan R Ginther defied insurmountable odds when she won the lottery four times. In 1993, she clinched her first win when she shared a Lotto Texas jackpot of 2.4 million dollars. He hit big again in 2006 and won $2 million from a Holiday Millionaire scratch-off.
Ginther enjoyed success again in 2008 as she won $3 million by taking part in the Millions and Millions game. Her next win was a jackpot of $10 million, and it came from $50 worth of scratch cards.
Her total lottery winnings summed up to $20 million. People thought that her background as a math professor and a Ph.D. from Standford contributed to her success. But considering the odds of winning are so low, we suspect she is just fortunate.
4. Richard Lusting
Richard Lusting gained celebrity when he won seven lotteries. Between 1993 and 2010, the smallest prize he won was a holiday trip to Memphis, and his biggest one was a whopping $842,152.91. His total winnings were over a million dollars.
Not everyone was satisfied with the tips and methods offered by Lusting, and they were deemed useless by many critics. Felix Salmon, a financial journalist, questioned whether Lusting had gained any profit from his winning tickets, considering the amount of money he spent on the tickets.
3. Stefan Mandel
Stefan Mandel made lots of headlines in 1992 when he won $27 million in a Virginia jackpot on an Australian syndicate. But this winner didn’t just get lucky—the mathematician planned carefully and bought every possible combination of numbers.
Mandel had been planning and practicing for a long time. While some people accidentally won, the Romanian economist read countless books and tested his theories regularly to develop the ultimate winning formula and managed to secure some serious money tickets.
Lottery officials have changed the system a lot since Mandel’s time. It is no longer possible to get all the number of combinations as they are practically infinite. Guessing the winning numbers accurately is also next to impossible.
2. Armand Paganelli
Armand Paganelli became a local celebrity when he won 16 lotteries within two years. He bought tickets between 2013 and 2014 at a drugstore owned by Paganelli and his brothers.
Many people (including those at the lottery headquarters) suspected that he was cheating—it seemed curious that the first person to win so many tickets purchased them from his own store. But it is legal to buy tickets they are selling themselves.
Paganelli’s winnings amounted to $625,000. He confessed that he likes to buy a lot of tickets as he is a fan of gambling. What’s interesting about this is that his wife is the opposite—she is completely against gambling, but contributed to the purchase of these money tickets.
And those tickets made him one of the biggest lottery winners in history. But our favorite part of the story is that made excellent use of his winnings, spending most of them on child education and charity.
1. Deborah Brown
2019 was an extraordinary year for Deborah Brown, as she won 30 lotteries on the same day. She is still the first person to achieve this (that we know of).
All the tickets she initially bought had the same combination of numbers 1-0-3-1. She bought each of them at a Chesterfield County gas station. She bought another ten tickets of the same combination from the same gas station after seeing the numbers multiple times throughout the day.
The draw was on 11 February, and Brown won the maximum price on all of her thirty tickets, earning $15,000. She made a smart decision and became the most frequent lottery winner in a day. With her earnings, she decided to invest her money in a home makeover.
