Lottery law aims to tackle surge in fraud
The mainland will issue its first national laws on the burgeoning lottery industry next year, offering regulators the power to combat a growing number of frauds.
'Other countries and regions always make laws before developing their lottery industry, while China has acted to the contrary,' Ding Feng, of the Legislative Affairs Office, was quoted by Xinhua as saying yesterday in Shanghai.
He said the new law would cover areas such as distribution, sales, the announcement of results and fund management. The mainland manages the industry based mainly on a provisional lottery regulation issued by the Ministry of Finance in 2002, which has long been criticised by ticket buyers and experts as impractical and lacking in detail.
The state lottery has generated a huge amount of money for social welfare causes in the past 20 years and become a way for ordinary people to strike it rich. A lottery buyer in Gansu province won a record 102.7 million yuan last week.
But the industry has witnessed growing fraud and other malpractice.
Last month, a 36-year-old lottery vendor in Anshan was sentenced to life in jail for taking advantage of a flaw in the system to pick up an illegal windfall of 28 million yuan.
A few months ago, two bank employees in the northern city of Handan got the death penalty for the mainland's largest bank theft - nearly 51 million yuan. They spent part of it on lottery tickets.
