Home>News Center>China | ||
11 people jailed for Xi'an lottery fraud
Eleven people who tried to defraud Chinese lottery winners by having their
tickets declared forgeries were sentenced Friday to prison terms of up to 19
years, news reports said, following a scandal in which one disappointed winner
threatened suicide.
Yang Yongming, a contractor who sold lottery tickets for the Xi'an city sports bureau, was convicted of leading the scheme to steer prizes to accomplices instead of the real winners, the Xinhua News Agency said. It said he was sentenced to 19 years by the Xi'an Intermediate People's Court. Jia Anqing, former director of the sports bureau, was sentenced to 13 years for helping Yang in exchange for bribes, according to Xinhua. The scheme involved having winning lottery tickets falsely declared forgeries, clearing the way for prizes to be awarded to Yang's accomplices, according to earlier reports.
Lottery officials later apologized to the man and presented him with the car and 120,000 yuan (US$15,000) in cash. Four other government employees and five outsiders also were convicted, including the deputy director of sports lotteries for Shaanxi province, where Xi'an is located. The provincial official, Zhang Yongmin, was sentenced to seven years and others received terms ranging from six months to 17 years. |
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||