Meet The Valley Man Who Keeps Winning The Lottery

LOS ANGELES, CA — If the odds against winning the lottery are well into the hundreds of millions, imagine how astronomically lucky you have to be to win it four times in a single year?

Meet Antulio Mazariegos, the San Fernando Valley man who can’t seem to lose the lottery. Mazariegos recently collected a $5 million check for a California Black Premium scratcher he bought at the Liquor Bank on Vanowen Street in Van Nuys. The ticket was his second seven-figure winning scratcher in less than a year. In November, he collected $1 million with a winning Emerald 10’s scratcher he bought at U.S.A. Donuts on Roscoe Boulevard in Panorama City. Oh, and when Mazariegos walked into the California Lottery Office with the $5 million-winning ticket, he had a couple of other scratchers in his pocket worth $1,000 and $600 respectively.

What are the odds? Officially, the odds are insane.

“It’s a crazy number,” said Elias Dominguez, public information officer for the California Lottery. “It’s almost impossible to calculate that.”

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Trust him, he’s tried. Last year, a 19-year-old woman won a scratcher worth about $550,000 and another worth $100,000 in the same week. The lottery worked with a statistician to try to calculate the odds, concluding they were too astronomical to accurately quantify.

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Dominguez said he’s never seen anyone win two huge prizes like this before.

“He really didn’t have any sort of formula that he went by,” Dominguez said. “He has certain stores he likes to play at, certain stores he thinks are lucky.”

Maybe Mazariegos is onto something.

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Overwhelmed by the media attention surrounding his luck, Mazariegos has declined interviews, shunning the limelight.

“He’s actually a really quiet, soft-spoken guy,” said Dominguez.

Mazariegos was even reluctant to have his photo taken, and he didn’t expect all the media and attention inundating him, added Dominguez. He’s hoping it will go away. What are the odds of that?

Photo courtesy of the California Lottery