Chinese Lottery Scams

With the growing popularity of Chinese Lottery and the ever growing lure of the big prizes, scrupulous individuals have tried (but failed) to come up with lottery scams. Here are some of them:

Hacked Lottery Computer System

In June 2009, a software engineer named only as Cheng reportedly broke into Shenzhen’s local lottery database and manipulated the system to produce lottery tickets with winning numbers. The prize money amounted to 33 million Yuan ($4.84 million).

Police eventually apprehended the hacker.

Forged Ticket

In June 2004 at Northwest China's Shaanxi Province, a court found that Yang Yongming, a ticket selling contractor cheated to claim the top four prizes.

Liu Liang, 17-year-old lottery fan, had a winning ticket that offered a prize of 120,000 Yuan (US$14,500) and a new BMW car worth of 480,000 Yuan (US$58,000).

But the lottery center claimed that Liu Liang held a fake lottery ticket, prompting Liu to take the center to court.

After investigations, Yang (the contractor) and 4 other suspects were arrested by the local police. Eventually, Xi'an lottery center authorities declared the lottery ticket belonging to Liu as the winner and apologized for the scam.

E-mail Scam

Have you ever received an email similar to this?

China Welfare Lottery
No.184 Jiefang Bei Road, Zhunhai

Guangdong Province,
China

Attn: (Your name usually appears here),

This is to inform you that the China Welfare Lottery has issued your file to enable you proceed to claim your winning fund from Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC BANK ASIA CHINA) Website: www.icbc.com.cn You are advice to contact Mr.Larry Young, of ICBC bank Fund Manager Tel: +86-20-39551014 Email: info@icbcdgc.com.cn for transferring of your award-winning fund to your account in your country.

Contact our office as soon as your fund is transfer to your account to enable us reconcile with our account.

Yours truly,
Mrs. Gao Ling,
Coordinator

Have you ever replied or sent money to the sender of these types of email? If your answer is yes, then you’ve been scammed.

The real Industrial and Commercial Bank of China has no connection to any lotteries in China or elsewhere.

The "real" China Welfare Lottery is run only by the Chinese government through the China Welfare Lottery Issuance Center and the China Sports Lottery Administration Center. You can only win only if you have bought a lottery ticket in China.

They do not run any kind of "email lottery". As a general rule, every "email lottery" is a scam, aimed at making you believe that you have won a big prize but eventually asking you to send them your own money.