Mystery winner is multimillionaire
- Source: Global Times
- [08:52 August 12 2010]
- Comments
Sun Zhimin, owner of a lottery booth on Dalian Road in Yangpu district, points Wednesday at the winning numbers announced Tuesday evening for the No.1 prize of the Double Color Ball lottery. Photo: Ray Yang
By Chen Xiaoru
The winning pair of tickets for the second-largest national lottery prize amount of 259 million yuan ($38.23 million) were purchased in the city, but the winner had not claimed his or her money as of Wednesday, sparking debate online about the legitimacy of the historic affair.
Run by the China Welfare Lottery, the winning Double Color Ball lottery numbers were announced Tuesday at 10:30 pm on Dragon TV.
But lottery officials said Wednesday that the winner, who is said to have purchased both the first and second prize winning tickets, had not yet come to receive his or her prize. The winner has 60 days to claim the first prize worth roughly 253 million yuan ($37.34 million) and the second prize valued at about 6 million yuan ($885,648).
"Since the winner hasn't come for his or her money, we have no idea who this person is," a press officer surnamed Wang, who declined to provide his full name, from the Shanghai Welfare Lottery Center, told the Global Times Wednesday.
According to lottery vendor Sun Zhimin, who sold the winning tickets at his booth on Dalian Road in Yangpu district, said Wednesday that he remembered the woman who bought the tickets on Monday evening because she specifically chose two different number patterns, and purchased 50 of the 2-yuan ($0.30) tickets for each.
For the Double Color Ball lottery, which randomly selects six prize amounts for a winning series of seven pairs of double-digit numbers, a winner gets more money if they have bought multiple tickets for the winning numbers. Foreigners can also play Chinese lotteries.
Sun said that his customers usually let the machine pick their numbers.
A shop assistant, who works at the booth and who preferred not to be identified, recollected that the woman wore glasses, and spoke Shanghai dialect.
"She had been coming here to buy lottery tickets for the past few months," he added.
Lottery press officer Wang said Wednesday that lottery officials are considering opening up the "green path" for the winner.
Green path privileges allow a winner to be escorted with security to and from the lottery center when claiming his or her prize. It also means that media are prohibited from publishing the identity of the winner.
The green path is meant to protect individuals who win large prize amounts. The privilege was last year granted to a middle-aged man from Henan Province. He won 350 million yuan ($51.66 million), the largest national lottery prize amount ever.
Because the Henan man never publicly claimed his fortune, many believed that he had cheated his way to the prize money. Similar rumors were floating around in cyberspace Wednesday about the mystery multimillionaire winner.
"This person didn't just win first prize, but also second, not to mention that he or she put a lot of stakes on the same numbers," an online user, who goes by the name of Huoyang, said Wednesday on IT.com.cn, a website popular among people in the IT industry. "He or she must have cheated somehow."
The most recent case of foul play in the lottery system happened last year, when an engineer in Shenzhen hacked into the China Welfare Lottery system and almost walked away with 33 million yuan ($4.87 million) before he was caught by local police.
According to Gu Xiaoming, a professor who specializes in lottery studies from Fudan University, while it is peculiar that the person went out of his or her way to buy so many tickets with the same numbers, it is possible that the result was nothing more than a lucky coincidence.
"For all we know this person may have chosen the numbers for personal reasons, maybe based on the birth dates of loved ones," he told the Global Times Wednesday. "We can't rule out that this rare probability could have simply boiled down to sheer luck."
If the lottery prize amount is claimed in time, the winner will altogether receive 207 million yuan ($30.56 million) after the 20-percent government tax is deducted.
