Three hundred and fifty-eight. That’s how many times Akil P. Patel, Florida’s luckiest lottery player, beat the odds and cashed in a scratch-off ticket of at least $600 since 2015. 

To expect to win that many times, Patel would need to buy enough tickets to stack – like a deck of cards – from the ground past the top of New York City’s One World Trade Center, nearly 1,800 feet up. 

That’s more than 1.8 million tickets, said Will Cipolli, an associate professor of mathematics at Colgate University. 

Statistically speaking, to win that often without extraordinary playing habits would be nearly impossible, he said.

“It’s more reasonable that something unusual is happening in the background than this would happen at random,” Cipolli said. He said the possibility of winning outright is miniscule, but it’s not zero.

Of Patel’s 358 winning tickets, nearly 300 were sold at a small Delray Beach market, owned by Patel’s uncles, according to public records and an interview with one of the owners.

Will Cipolli, an associate professor of mathematics at Colgate University

Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, found more than a dozen other players like Patel, people who repeatedly beat staggering odds and had personal ties to the stores that sold the winning tickets.

The family ties, spelled out in public records, raise more questions about the already improbable scenario of winning the lottery time and time again, watchdogs say.

Those who are hurt, they said, are Florida’s everyday people.

“I can't prove it, but you feel like there's something else going on,” Cipolli said.

Fresh Take Florida’s investigation found:   

• Patel, of Boca Raton, cashed in nearly half the winning tickets sold at the Fairway Market and Deli. His wins there totaled to more than $500,000. Patel did not respond to multiple messages and calls to his line and the store he won at.
• Arvindkumar N. Patel, no relation to Akil, cashed in nearly half of every big-winning ticket sold at a store in Crystal River where a relative is a registered agent, according to state records. His 49 wins made him $170,000. He also did not respond to multiple messages.
• Imtiaz Ahmed of Fort Myers took home 47 of the 135 winning tickets sold at a store public records show his relative owns. On Feb. 15, 2024, Ahmed claimed four winners, beating odds of 1 in 3,000, 1 in 12,000 and twice beating odds of 1 in 10,000. Ahmed did not respond to multiple messages, either.

Of the repeat winners who spoke to Fresh Take Florida reporters for this series, all said they did not cheat. They play a lot and are lucky, they said. Many refused to comment.

None of the winners nor their family members have been accused of wrongdoing.

Florida Lottery officials declined multiple interview requests.

In a statement, spokesperson Alecia Collins wrote: “The Florida Lottery maintains strict oversight measures to monitor retailer activity and investigate potential misconduct. The Division of Security leads the department’s Retailer Integrity Program and operates from district offices statewide to proactively review complaints, conduct investigations, and coordinate with State Attorney’s Offices when prosecution is warranted.” 

Beating the odds

Hitting a big win on a scratch-off ticket is rare. The odds of winning $1,000 range from roughly one in 1,500 to more than one in 100,000. The majority fall somewhere in the middle.

To win bigger prizes such as $20,000, the odds get worse, sometimes stretching to one in more than a million, lottery records show.

Reporters found relatives of store owners defying the odds dozens of times.

Texas Lottery watchdog Dawn Nettles said such connections could be the result of one of two scenarios: an addiction or a scam.

Big winners could have gambled their money away and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, on tickets, she said.

But Nettles said it’s more likely that a store owner stole winning tickets from innocent players and passed them to relatives to cash in. 

Players often present tickets to the person behind the convenience store counter to see if they’re a winner. If they are, a scanner chimes. But sometimes players don’t hear the noise, and the clerk keeps the ticket, Nettles said. 

“When you have multiple wins by a single person, it's a scratch ticket and they're big wins, yes, I would be suspicious of them,” Nettles said. “Or they're a real big addict.”

Reid Galbreath, a former California State Lottery investigations officer turned whistleblower, said he encountered multiple instances of what Nettles suggested – owners stealing tickets and funneling them to relatives.

During a California lottery sting, a store owner stole a fake winning ticket, and gave it to his mother to cash in, Galbreath said. The investigation found the mother claimed multiple big-winning tickets, he said.   

But lottery officials often ignore such cheating, not wanting to bring negative attention to a game built on trust, Galbreath said.

“It's easier to do that than to publicly admit that you have an issue with fraud,” he said. “Everybody should have equal chances to win, and when you control the game and you are allowing people to manipulate it, it's not an even playing field.”

The same is likely happening in Florida, he said.

‘Something shady going on’

Outside of a small convenience store in Jacksonville, triangular cardboard signs cover parking space poles. They feature the Florida Lottery agency’s pink flamingo mascot with the words “Play here!” printed below in bold, white letters. 

Inside the store and behind a glass panel is Chadi Boutros, the owner of Sunrise Food Store, which sits on a street corner of a largely residential neighborhood. To his right is a display with more than 40 colorful rolls of lottery scratch-off tickets. 

In the past 11 years, Boutros’s wife, Rana Hilal Boutros, has won a share of those tickets – 12 to be exact, according to a data analysis by Fresh Take Florida. She took home about $24,000 as a result.  

Chadi Boutros won 28 times there for about $34,000 in total.

Chadi Boutros declined to comment on his or his wife’s wins when a reporter met him at his store and contacted him via email. Rana did not return a message left at their house or phone calls and emails. Neither have been accused of wrongdoing.

Although Chadi Boutros won more, experts said the more questionable wins are his wife’s. They say connections like hers could be a way owners are gaming the system, beating the odds and cheating their customers.

Skip Garibaldi, a mathematician and former professor at Emory University and UCLA

One of those experts is mathematician Skip Garibaldi. Fresh Take Florida reporters provided Garibaldi with data on more than 30 of Florida’s most prolific winners since 2015. Some were regular players. Some were store owners. Others had ties to store owners.

“My suspicion is that there is something shady going on in every case,” Garibaldi said. “And the only question is, what exactly is the shady thing that's happening?” 

Garibaldi calculated the minimum amount the players would have to spend to legitimately win as often as they did.

For Rana Boutros to win as often as she won, Garibaldi calculated she would need to spend $26,000 on scratch-off tickets since she first won in 2023.

In 2014, Garibaldi did a similar analysis for the Palm Beach Post, which conducted its own investigation into the Florida Lottery. 

Following the investigation, the Florida Lottery terminated the licenses of 18 retailers, citing evidence of fraud. 

Florida’s biggest winner

No one in Florida has cashed in more winning scratch-off tickets since 2015 than Akil. P. Patel, data show. 

One hundred and fifty-three times, he traveled to a lottery office or filled out an online form to claim a ticket worth at least $600, Fresh Take Florida found. In some cases, Patel claimed a handful of winners on the same day.

On one trip, he had eight winning tickets in hand. Three times he claimed six winning tickets and on 12 occasions he cashed in five winners, data show. 

Month after month, year after year, Patel claimed big-winning tickets, a feat most people hope to do just once in their lifetime.

Between January 2023 and December 2025 – a span of 36 months – there was only one month, February 2025, when Patel did not claim a big prize.

Of Patel’s 358 wins, 293 were sold at Fairway Market & Deli, a corner market in Delray Beach. Pradeep and Shailashkumar Patel, Patel’s uncles, own the store, according to public records.

When contacted by phone, Pradeep Patel declined to answer questions about the deli.

Neither Patel nor the store owners have been accused of wrongdoing. 

Although claiming that many top prizes is not statistically impossible, Garibaldi said for Patel to legitimately win 358 times, he’d have to spend a minimum of nearly $4,000 a day on scratch-off tickets since 2015. That’s $1.4 million a year or $15 million total.

“He's got to have a compelling story to explain all of those wins,” Garibaldi said. “And it ain't going to be, ‘I buy 20 bucks of scratch-off tickets a day.’ That's a 
BS answer.”