The final episode of the new Mexican thriller comedy-drama show on Netflix, How to Win the Lottery, covers the suspense following the lottery fraud and presents the ultimate fates of the perpetrators as well. Despite the extremely careful measures taken by Jose Luis and his associates, the fraud is exposed by the end, and in no less dramatic fashion. Being based on very real incidents from 2012, it is expected of the show to inform about the real-life fraudsters and what happened to them after the exposé, but sadly very little information can be found, even in the official records in Mexico, about the perpetrators and their fates. The showmakers have still left us with hypothetical and imaginary conclusions about the characters we follow through the 6 episodes, rounding up the mostly fictional stories about their lives and desperate motivations.
Spoiler Alert
How does Jose Luis’ plan start to fall apart?
Once the lottery fraud has been successfully carried out, meaning that the winning numbers have been announced to be the exact same ones that the group had bought tickets for, the five friends celebrate their success at a bar through the whole night. As morning breaks, Jose Luis Conejera once again takes charge of the group, being the mastermind behind the whole plan, and presents very clear instructions to his associates. Although they have won a total of 160 million dollars, which is to be shared equally among all of them, they still need to lay low and avoid any kind of suspicion, and according to Jose Luis, the best way to do so would be to continue with their normal lives. He asks them to return to work as per usual and act as if nothing special has happened to any of them. His advice is also for them to not suddenly spend a lot of money, which would obviously raise suspicions against them, since their mediocre jobs are not supposed to bring them a lot of earnings, especially in a short time. Most importantly, Jose Luis insists that they do not cash in their winnings yet and give it a few days instead so that things settle down and nobody among the authorities, especially the auditor, Katy, will no longer be keeping a keen eye out for the winners. All the members in the group agree to abide by these basic rules, and they passionately promise to remain united in their endeavors so that none of them will cause legal trouble for the others.
However, this promise is not kept ultimately, especially when it comes down to desperate matters in the personal lives of the accomplices, and it is Lina who makes the first move of ‘betrayal,’ if we may call it so. Lina’s situation is undoubtedly the most desperate among the entire group, as she needs the money in order to get back custody of her son from her evil ex-husband, and having tried every legal method in the books, she has now resorted to unlawful ways to be together with her beloved son once again. After the fraud has been successfully committed, Lina visits her son and tells him about a trip that they are soon going to take together, mentally preparing the young boy for leaving the country very soon. But the boy innocently asks her in return whether they are going to move back in with his father at a place called Goodlands. This makes Lina realize that her ex-husband has made a similar plan of leaving with the young boy as well, to cut her out of their lives once and for all. She learns from her son that the ex-husband is waiting for the judges’ order, which would allow him to execute his plan, and since the man already has quite some influence in the legal ranks of the authority, Lina immediately realizes that she needs to act very quickly to successfully leave Mexico with her son first. Therefore, she calls up her ever-helpful half-sister, Sara, and asks her to cash in the lottery ticket right away so that they can immediately get the money and start executing their plan of leaving the country. Sara had held on to Lina’s ticket, since the latter could not have obviously cashed it in herself, being the very face of the lottery, and she withdraws the money for her sister and also quickly gets in touch with a shady agent who can arrange fake passports and tickets for them in order to leave the country.
How do the others react to Lina’s ‘betrayal’?
As Lina cashes in her share of the lottery winnings, Katy is naturally informed about it by her subordinate, and she shares the news with Jose Luis, who does well to hide his anger and frustration in front of her. He immediately marches to the recording station and confronts his accomplices, but since Lina is the only one missing, and the others assure him that they have not done anything to hamper their plan, it is very evident to everyone that it is the presenter who has cashed in her ticket. This marks the ultimate moment of the plan falling apart, as the others promise each other that they won’t be cashing in their prizes but immediately rush to do so at the earliest chance. Once Lina has withdrawn her part of the winnings, nobody wants to take a chance anymore.
Thus, Mario and Gilberto send their cousin, Tito, to cash in the prize for them, while Charly asks the pastor of his church, Jacobo, who had really played an important role in convincing him to partake in the fraud, to withdraw his share of the money. Each of the characters had been desperate to get hold of the money, as Charly was being constantly pestered by Jacobo to bring the money to the church, as the expensive renovations could not go through without clearing the payments with the builders first. On the other side, the Velasco brothers could not wait to get away from their boring and menial lives in the city to move to the beachside and open their fancy VIP club at the place, along with their cousin, Tito.
Very soon, Jose Luis understands that he is the only one missing out on making use of the money right away, and so he decides to cash in his part as well. Jose Luis too is in a hurry to start his own racing team in order to fund his daughter’s career in the sport, with the dream of making her the first woman driver in Formula 1, and so he needs to cash in on his ticket as well. He seeks the help of his partner, Laura, who had agreed to be his secret accomplice quite some time back, and she now happily withdraws the money for him. But he advises her to get the ticket cashed in at the nearby city of Zacatecas for two very specific reasons. Firstly, the taxes to be paid for winning the lottery are considerably lower in Zacatecas, and secondly, perhaps more importantly, it would take a few days for the information about the amount having been withdrawn to reach Katy, and so she would not suspect anything wrong.
What does Katy suspect?
Unfortunately for Jose Luis, his very move of withdrawing the money from Zacatecas makes Katy all the more suspicious because of the discrepancies in the details. While the detail about Zacatecas is not suspicious by itself, as the winner might as well be from the city, Katy soon finds out that all four tickets (since the Velasco brothers together have 1 ticket) had been bought from a store close to the Pronósticos office in Mexico City, meaning that the winner is not a resident of Zacatecas after all. What makes her even more suspicious is the fact that only the employees of the lottery service and the government know about the fact that Zacatecas offers more tax exemptions, which makes her certain that someone with inside knowledge must have won the lottery. Katy quickly goes over to the shop from where the tickets had been sold, looking for information about the physical appearances of the buyers, but what she gets is all the more crucial.
The shop owner obviously remembers the buyers because of their extremely peculiar demand of giving them tickets with the exact numbers that they had, instead of a usual computer-generated ticket. As she reports this to Katy, it further adds to her suspicion that someone had used insider information to buy tickets for the exact numbers and had then won the lottery, and now the fact that the winners of such a grand prize were not interested in being interviewed or spoken to makes more sense to her. But in her mind, she has a completely different suspect, for she is a very close friend of Jose Luis and really admires him for his honesty and moral character. Instead, she feels it is their corrupt boss, Tarto, who must have executed the grand fraud to steal all the lottery money for himself.
There are a few clues to back her belief as well, starting with the fact that the date of the lottery draw is just a couple of days ahead of Tarto leaving the department, making it appear like he is about to get hold of the money and immediately leave. Tarto is also known to steal and misdirect funds from social welfare causes to the accounts of politicians and even himself, making him a shady character already. Furthermore, he never visits the recording studio during the lottery draw, but on that specific day when the particular draw was made, Tarto had indeed visited the studio all of a sudden, and Katy is now confident that he had visited to ensure that he would be able to pull off the planned fraud. Katy shares her thoughts with Jose Luis, hoping that he would back her, but he tries to convince her to let the matter go, stating that she would not be able to prove the scam even if Tarto had indeed cheated the lottery system.
How does Katy stumble upon the real truth?
Frustrated by the lack of support, Katy decides to take matters into her own hands and directly confronts Tarto at his office for having orchestrated a financial fraud, which he denies doing. But it is at his office that Katy finally stumbles upon the real truth, through a photograph that had been in his office for just a few days. During a party at Tarto’s house a couple of months earlier, he and his wife had gotten a photo taken with Jose Luis and Laura, and a framed version of this photo had been made part of the decoration at his office. Now that Tarto is leaving the department, he gathers all his belongings from the office, and Katy happens to see the framed photograph now. She immediately recognizes Laura as the woman who had withdrawn the winners’ money from Zacatecas, as she had already gone through the documents submitted by the individuals who had withdrawn the money. Katy confronts Tarto, saying that Laura must be his accomplice who has helped him take out his share of the lottery, and now shockingly learns that the woman is actually Jose Luis’ partner.
How is the fraud exposed?
Despite finding it difficult to believe that such a morally upright person as Jose Luis Conejera is the real perpetrator who had orchestrated and executed the lottery scam, Katy chooses to side with the truth and find evidence against her beloved colleague. She approaches the higher authorities with the information, hoping that an investigation will be launched, but all the officials refuse to do anything about it. They simply do not want to mess with the lottery system, as doing so would take up a lot of resources and time, and as their final effort to dissuade her, they remind Katy that she too will be investigated for having failed at her job if the scam is indeed proven. Helpless and feeling lost, Katy asks her father, a professional lawyer, for advice, and it is he who suggests that she leak the whole fiasco to the media, which will most definitely lead to the authorities taking action.
Soon, Katy gets in touch with a journalist and shows her all the findings of her personal investigation, which also includes a very crucial piece of evidence that can be easily used to prove the scam. The perpetrators had executed the scam by running a pre-recorded video banner of the winning numbers alongside the live telecast, making it seem like the numbers from the pre-recorded video were the ones randomly picked as the lucky winning figure. But in a split-second frame of the telecast recording, it is very evident that the balls with the winning numbers keep floating in air even when the spare balls fall back into the raffle box, which happens only when the compressed air stops flowing. To put it simply, the winning balls could not keep moving and floating when the spare balls fell back down, since the compressed air making them move was stopped. Thus, this short frame of the video is enough to prove that the video banner of the winning number balls was actually prerecorded, and the media soon runs this news extensively, causing a huge scandal.
What ultimately happens to the five perpetrators?
Soon, the authorities have to react and deploy the police to find and arrest all the individuals who had withdrawn the lottery winnings, as the real perpetrators can be easily reached through them. The police detain Tito and quickly arrest Mario and Gilberto, while they find Charly through his church and arrest him. Jose Luis makes a last-minute attempt to flee using his daughter’s racing kart and also successfully distracts the police to ensure that Laura can flee, but he is ultimately caught. Lina is the only perpetrator who manages to escape, with the help of Sara and the fake passports that she had gotten arranged for themselves. Lina is also able to reunite with her son and forever keep him with her, and the three of them are last seen taking a bus to Guatemala.
In How to Win the Lottery’s ending, the scam was ultimately determined to be a minor offense by the law, meaning that most of the perpetrators did not get any severe punishment. Mario and Gilberto spent just two weeks in prison, and Charly spent only a few days in prison, possibly because they were considered to be minor accomplices. Lina could never be caught by the police, and so she did not have to face any consequence for her actions. Jose Luis was clearly the mastermind, and so he was sent to jail quite a few times for the same case, but he kept stating his innocence throughout the time. Although their bank accounts were frozen by the authorities, they provided no clarification about what happened to the lottery money, suggesting that much of it had been removed to other accounts, and it could not ultimately be found. The particular lottery draw has never been held again, and the sales of the lottery company, Melate, fell by 25% following the fiasco.
How to Win the Lottery’s ending states that hardly anything else can be found about the real perpetrators, and so it provides a fictional end to each of them, at least completing their stories. According to the makers, Jose Luis Conejera could never hold any position in a public office again and ultimately died in the middle of a legal appeal process. His partner, Laura, had to live on the run as long as the case was open, moving from one city to another and assuming new identities, while their daughter, Karen, soon had to give up on her dreams of becoming a racing driver. Tarto was investigated by the law and found guilty of numerous acts of corruption and misappropriation, for which he was imprisoned. Pastor Jacobo was arrested at a shady motel and is now the leader of a religious sect in prison. Katy managed to expose the truth to the world but had to face repeated threats of being investigated, although nothing could be found against her by the end. Ultimately, the case was ended 12 years later without any major consequences.
