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China's biggest ever lottery win shrouded by mystery, suspicion
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2009-10-20 17:04
ZHENGZHOU: First came shock and envy. Then speculation on the identity of China's biggest-ever lottery prize winner. And finally came suspicion over the credibility of the country's lottery industry.
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The unidentified buyer has yet to come forward to claim the gigantic "Dual-colored Ball" jackpot of the China Welfare Lottery.
Calls from the public and the media have poured into the Henan provincial Welfare Lottery center, asking for the identity of the winner.
When lottery officials released the address of the outlet that sold the winning ticket in Anyang's Yindu District, reporters from across the country swarmed into the small store, trying to dig up details of the winner.
"I vaguely remembered that a man in his 30s or 40s bought that ticket," recalled the vendor, Chen Guixia. "He spoke with a local accent.
"The player is not a regular customer in my shop. I can't remember exactly how he looked and dressed," she said.
Before selling the record jackpot winning ticket, Chen had sold second prizes in the Welfare Lottery twice since opening for business in 2001.
Rumors circulating among the media and local community pointed to different versions on the winner's identity, including a truck driver, a security guard, a steel products store owner and a pool of four people.
According to the provincial Welfare Lottery center, the buyer chose two lines of the same seven numbers, printed on a single ticket with a 44-draw spread, at a cost of 176 yuan ($25.8) at 2:55 p.m. on October 8. The ticket's total number of top prize stakes came to 88.
The Dual-colored Ball lottery consists of six red ball numbers from 1 to 33 plus one blue ball number from 1 to 16. A maximum of five bets can be printed on one ticket and players can spread the bet over multiple draws using the same set of numbers.
The jackpot numbers drawn that evening were 05, 12, 16, 25, 26, 27 and 31.
The winner must pay 20 percent of the win in a personal windfall income tax, or about 72 million yuan ($10.5 million).
The previous single-ticket lottery record was held by a player in Jiayuguan, in northwest China's Gansu Province, who won 113.8 million yuan ($16.7 million) in the Dual-colored Ball in November 2007 by spreading a set of numbers over 20 draws.
Members of the public used the popular website, Baidu.com, to allege the record win could be the result of manipulation of the draw. They cited a post dated September 21 on the website showing how to win a lottery jackpot of 300 million yuan by playing in an identical way.
The IP address of the anonymous person who lodged the post was also from Henan Province, a coincidence that fueled suspicions of fraud.
Another post by an unidentified "insider of China's lottery industry" alleged on the Tianya BBS website on October 12 that the "Dual-colored Ball" lottery was used by lottery issuing institutions to "cheat money out of lottery players" as the video of the draw was pre-recorded.
The "insider" said the lottery issuing agencies could use the two-hour time gap between last-minute sales and the draw to manipulate the results.
The Welfare Lottery's Dual-colored Ball is drawn three times a week: on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. The insider said the lottery issuing agency used a super computer to analyze sales data and the draw team pre-taped several versions of each high-jackpot draw. Higher officials of the lottery issuing agencies then allegedly decided which set to broadcast.
Lottery officials, however, have not commented on the allegation.
Lottery frauds and scandals have been reported in different cities in China over the past five years.
A software-design engineer surnamed Cheng broke into a database of the Welfare Lottery center in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, on June 9 this year in an attempt to win 33 million yuan ($4.83 million) on the "Dual-colored Ball" lottery.
Employed by a high-tech company contracted with the lottery management center to work on a system upgrade, Cheng hacked into the system and falsified entries for five winning tickets.
Those tickets were among nine that won the top prize in the "Dual-colored Ball" lottery on June 9. Each ticket was worth roughly 6.6 million yuan ($1 million).
The management center detected the fraud shortly after it was announced there were nine winning tickets. After an investigation, they concluded the computerized sales system had been hacked and data changed. They contacted police at 2 a.m. on June 10.
Police assigned specialist on-line crime investigators, who staked out the prize collection center and arrested Cheng on June 12.
