A Court Ordered a Lottery Store Owner to Pay Back the 2.81 Million Yuan He Kept From a Customer's Winning Ticket
A Zhejiang court has ruled that a lottery shop owner who secretly redeemed a customer's winning ticket must pay back the remaining 2.81 million yuan of a prize he had already agreed to return — after the customer, in a settlement, had voluntarily let him keep 1 million.
A lottery store owner in Huzhou, Zhejiang, was asked by a regular customer to buy a set of numbers on his behalf. The ticket won the first prize — 8.25 million yuan before tax, 6.6 million after. The ticket had never been handed over, so the owner, Wang, redeemed it himself the next morning, and within days he had moved the money to his wife, his father-in-law and his parents.
The court document, published recently on China's Judgments Online by the Nanxun District People's Court and reported by Red Star News, reads like a slow-motion study of how a windfall dissolves. On November 6, 2025, the day after the draw, Wang withdrew the 6.6 million yuan; by early afternoon he had transferred 2.3 million yuan to a company, and 1 million to his father-in-law; the next day, 505,300 yuan to his mother. When the customer, Yan, discovered what had happened and sued, the two sides reached a settlement in December 2025: Yan agreed to let Wang keep 1 million yuan of the prize, and Wang agreed to pay back 5.6 million. He paid 2.79 million, then stopped.
Yan sued again — this time naming Wang, his wife, his father-in-law, his mother, his father and the company his father owned. The court found that the two had a contract of mandate: the ticket belonged to Yan even though the paper never changed hands, and the settlement was valid. Wang's failure to pay the remaining 2.81 million yuan was a fundamental breach, and his relatives' accounts — which had been emptied by the time the court came to freeze them — amounted to helping the tort. The court ordered Wang to pay the remaining 2.81 million yuan plus interest, and held the company and his father jointly liable for up to 2.3 million, and his mother for up to 505,300.
The case says something about the trust economy of the lottery counter. In China, buying a lottery ticket through the shop owner — a purchase arranged over a platform or a phone message — is common practice, and the ruling makes clear that the ticket belongs to the person who ordered it, not the person holding it. But it also shows the mechanics that follow: money moved between family members within hours, and the accounts that received it drained before the court could act.
The case drew wide attention on Weibo after the judgment was published, with the detail that the customer had already given up a million yuan of his own prize in the settlement — and Wang still did not pay — striking readers as the story's sharpest turn.