Lottery ban designed to stop fraud
Updated: 2008-01-03 07:25
Try Your Luck and Watch Your Mind
Zhang Rongsheng used to buy five 2-yuan lottery tickets every month. Now he spends 20 yuan a month on the palm-sized tickets because ordinary people seem to be winning the top prizes more often.
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"Of course, everybody wants to win. When I buy a ticket, I buy myself more fun and hope," says the 70-year-old retired high school teacher in Quanzhou, Fujian Province. Zhang is serious about the numbers, and seldom buys the tickets selected randomly by a computer. Instead, he chooses the numbers on the basis of his own "analysis" of the probability theory. "I've missed the right number narrowly several times," he says. But then he keeps reminding himself that it's only a game. "Expecting anything more than that might frustrate you because losers always far outnumber winners."
A recent survey shows that retirees like Zhang account for 12 percent of lottery ticket buyers in Quanzhou, a city where 60 percent of those who try their luck earn between 2,000 and 3,000 yuan ($272 and $408) a month, with migrant workers making up the rest.
In late November, a resident of Jiayuguan in Gansu Province won the country's biggest jackpot of 102.7 million yuan ($14 million) after buying 20 identical "Double Color Ball" tickets. Since then, reports on the prize's authenticity, mysterious winner and even conjectures on the way he'd spend the money have flooded the Internet.
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"Currency notes adding to that amount can fill up four 1.5-ton capacity vans, buy 4 million kg of pork, 25 luxurious offshore villas or 56 BMW 760s, or yield an annual interest of 3.34 million yuan ($454,420) -- a sum that would take an office clerk 30 years to save - if deposited in a bank," says a recent online article. Just how huge the amount is can be gauged from the fact that last year, the average disposable income of urban residents was 11,759 yuan ($1,612), and the net income of an average farmer, 3,587 yuan ($492).
In contrast, first lottery winner Wen Guobin, from Shijiazhuang in Hebei Province, today earns a living by selling barbecues in a night market. His prize money could just cover his wedding expenses.
Lottery prize money has been swelling beyond people's imagination. In 1987, when China issued its first welfare lottery ticket, the top prize was 2,000 yuan ($274). But it still was a sensational amount because the per capita annual disposable income of an urban dweller then was 916 yuan.
The 20th anniversary of welfare lottery tickets in China seemed the perfect occasion to raise the prizes even higher. In August, a resident of Hebei Province won 41.7 million yuan ($5.7 million). Two months later, a Heilongjiang resident won 65 million yuan ($8.8 million) after buying 15 tickets with the same four sets of numbers. And a few weeks after the man from Gansu hit the jackpot, a person from Jiangsu Province picked up 40 million yuan.
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"It's good to see so many big prizes. That shows more people are buying lottery tickets and supporting the country's welfare system," says Yu Zhenhai, deputy director of Gansu's provincial welfare lottery administrative center.
Till December 21 last year, 423 billion yuan ($49 billion) worth of lottery tickets had been issued by the State-run welfare lottery administrative center, under the Ministry of Civil Affairs, and the sports lottery administrative center, under the State General Administration of Sport. Only these two departments are authorized to issue lottery tickets in China.
About 50 percent of that money has been paid back to ticket buyers as prizes, 15 percent used as distribution fee and other costs, and the rest spent on public welfare, such as education and healthcare for orphans, the elderly and the physically disabled, as well as public sports facilities.
More than 10 million people have benefited from the funds so raised. And more than 1.41 million of those 10 million people have moved into welfare houses, a six-fold increase from two decades ago. Last December, the central government announced it would allocate 300 million yuan ($41.12 million) from lottery revenue as special funds to help poor students in western China to complete their senior middle school studies.
The country's lottery market may have expanded fast, but the authorities still describe market penetration as slow because China's per capita lottery purchase was only 0.66 percent of the per capita net income last year, or equal to only 1-2 percent of the world average. Bigger prizes, however, could spur ticket sales because more people are now eager to become rich overnight through lotteries.
"I see a lot of new people buying 20 or more tickets with the same sets of numbers nowadays," says a lottery ticket vendor surnamed Zhu in Guangzhou. "Maybe it's the Gansu winner's influence. I usually try and persuade them to buy more sets of numbers instead to increase their chances of winning."
A survey covering lottery ticket buyers in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong shows that more than 90 percent of them dream of getting rich overnight, with only 23 percent seeing it as an act of charity. "Chinese lottery ticket buyers' attitude toward charity is still not mature," says Peking University sociology professor Xia Xueluan. "They need to be guided just like their counterparts in some Western countries where lotteries are called 'painless taxation'. Lottery ticket buyers should learn to assess their chances objectively and not to develop a gambler's mentality."
Such a mindset has already led to crimes and corruption. For instance, two bank employees in Handan in Hebei Province were sentenced to death in August after being found guilty of the country's most startling theft involving 50.95 million yuan ($6.9 million), which they spent on lottery tickets. Ren Xiaofeng, one of the convicts, told police that during his months on the run, he didn't feel like doing anything, not even eating. All he wanted to do was buying lottery tickets.
To prevent such developments among individuals, Chinese Academy of Sciences researcher in psychology Gao Wenbin suggests the setting up of an intervention mechanism. "Some lottery selling centers can experiment with machines that can read buyers' heartbeats and body temperatures to see whether they are in a normal state. Psychological lectures could also help," Gao says.
But the acting director of Peking University's China Center for Lottery Studies, Wang Xuehong, says the lack of laws and regulations and loopholes in the administrative and supervision systems are the major reason for frauds and other malpractices. A flaw in the "3D" welfare lottery system helped a 36-year-old lottery vendor in Anshan in Liaoning Province to encash 28 million yuan ($3.8 million) illegally. His crime, however, was detected, and last month he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
In 2004, several people were found guilty of manipulating a scratch-and-win sports lottery in Xi'an and awarded varying sentences. One of them, a lottery ticket contractor, cheated his way to the top prize of a BMW car and 120,000 yuan ($16,450) by marking lottery tickets and hiring four people to claim the "booty". Only after his fraud was uncovered that real prize-winner Liu Liang, a young migrant worker, got his due and accepted the apologies of the local sports authorities.
"China has only provisional regulations on lottery distribution and sales. And that again is only a departmental regulation issued by the Ministry of Finance," says Wang. "Can you imagine an industry that is worth billions of yuan being run without legal control for so many years?"
It's very important to have a set of unified standards for lottery distribution, training of officials and operators and a stable computer system to ensure lottery fund safety, she says. One of those important aspects is on its way to being addressed because the first national regulation on the management and supervision of the lottery industry is expected soon.
"Legislators will draw on overseas the experience to work out the regulation and explicitly explain each aspect of a lottery, including distribution, sales, declaration of results and fund management," an official with the Legislative Affairs Office of the State Council, Ding Feng, has said.
In fact, the country began working on a national regulation more than a decade ago. But the drafting of an all-encompassing rule was delayed because of the differences among government departments.
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Senior citizens in Yichang, Hubei Province, exercise in a facility built from sports lottery money. Liu Junfeng |
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