A SHENZHEN resident lost 270,000 yuan (US$39,723) in a month after he became obsessed with playing lucky draw on a website, according to sznews.com.

The resident, surnamed Liao, wanted to try his luck when he first played lucky draw on www.1yyg.com — a website run by a Shenzhen-based technology company — in early April after a friend recommended the website to him.

According to previous media reports, users can buy a “raffle ticket” for a product on the website with 1 yuan, and one person who wins the lucky draw can take the product home. For example, an iPhone 6S is priced at 4,388 yuan on the website, and users can buy 4,388 “raffle tickets” to win the phone, meaning the more tickets a user buys, the bigger chance he has.

Liao said he didn’t get suspicious about the website because he had won a prize after spending dozens of yuan on it. He continued to indulge in the lucky draws after he won an iPhone 7 Plus after he spent nearly 10,000 yuan. But then he found that it became harder for him to win a lottery as he invested more money on the website.

Liao said that some users of the website had a high rate of high winning. One user’s personal page showed that he had won gold bars and ingots, two cars, and over 100 iPhones, but Liao doubted the fairness of the lucky draws as there wasn’t a third party to supervise the lottery process.

The company’s office in its registered address in Shenzhen has already closed down. The website’s customer service representative said the website follows strict standards in running the lucky draws and it’s impossible for anyone to manipulate the results with backstage operations.

According to a previous report by CCTV, such lottery software can be bought online and operators can manipulate the results of a lucky draw in the backstage to make virtual robots win the lotteries.

Liao said he was told by the website’s customer service representatives that it would be difficult for him to win back the 270,000 yuan that he had spent on the website. According to him, he had complained about the website to several government departments but found that no department could handle the case.

According to the report, the website has been developing so rapidly due to being under the name of a new e-commerce business and there are loopholes in the existing market supervision system to curb such irregularities. (Zhang Yang)