Lottery ticket scores a record 570m yuan win
The mainland's Chinese Welfare Lottery will make the biggest payout in its history after a ticket won 570 million yuan (HK$698 million) in Tuesday night's draw.
The ticket was bought from a kiosk in a hotel in the Sanlitun area in the Chaoyang district of Beijing.
An employee at the kiosk told lottery representatives he had sold the ticket to a regular customer, said the Beijing Morning Post.
The punter had a habit of always asking the computer to generate the sequence of seven double-digit numbers the lottery uses, and he always placed 110 bets on his numbers.
Each correct bet is worth slightly more than 5 million yuan. As such, if the punter is indeed the owner of the winning ticket, he stands to win 570 million yuan. However, roughly 20 per cent of that will be paid in tax.
Another ticket - bought in Beijing's suburban Shunyi district - carried the winning sequence, but the buyer placed only one bet on it, entitling him to 5 million yuan.
The total jackpot for Tuesday's draw was 994 million yuan. Lottery officials have yet to release information on the winners.
The previous record prize was 565 million yuan, won by a businessman in Xinchang county, Zhejiang province, last year.
He too had made 110 bets on the same sequence of numbers.
The businessman donated 20 million yuan of his winnings to Xinchang's welfare institutions and paid 109 million yuan in tax.
Over in America, the biggest jackpot so far this year was US$336 million, which was won on February 13.
