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The story
At the “Utsunomiya Bell Mall Chance Center” lottery shop in Utsunomiya City, Tochigi Prefecture, the Summer Jumbo Premium’s ¥200 million first-prize preceding award was won — but in the same drawing group, the ¥800 million first-prize ticket and the ¥200 million first-prize following award (both “loose” single tickets) went unsold, forfeiting the right to claim them. Had all three sold, it would have added up to a combined ¥1 billion payout — the largest ever won at a lottery shop in Tochigi Prefecture. On 5ch, distrust of the drawing system itself clashed with voices simply chalking it up to probability.
Delivered 9/8 (Tue) 19:36
Shimotsuke Shimbun Digital
It came to light by the 8th that at the “Utsunomiya Bell Mall Chance Center” lottery shop in Utsunomiya’s Youtou 6-chome, the ¥800 million first prize and the ¥200 million first-prize following award for the “Summer Jumbo Premium” — which debuted as the highest jumbo-lottery jackpot ever, with first prize plus preceding and following awards combining for ¥1.2 billion — had gone unsold. Since the shop did sell the ¥200 million first-prize preceding award, had all three tickets sold, it would have made for the largest total ever won at a lottery shop in Tochigi Prefecture. All three were “loose” single tickets, and shop staff showed a mix of shock and frustration.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Or is that the trap?
Only the folks with a stake in it get to win lol
The prize money got split among the vested interests.
Looks like pure luck, but apparently there's been a trick since before the war where you throw darts at a spinning target to intentionally pick the winning number.
They get accused of rigging it that much and still won't change the system — must be some serious payoff in it for someone.
Well, before the war they figured out how to fire machine guns through spinning propeller blades without hitting them (interrupter gear tech), so I guess anything's possible.
A park bench oughta do it, right?
Replacing flood-damaged cars.
Come on, in this day and age if there were any real fraud going on, word would definitely leak out from somewhere.
They love turning this into news just to stir up buying interest.
There must've been unsold winning tickets before too, obviously.
Especially the "Premium" version, which cranked the rip-off factor up even more.
Guess I'll go buy it now (lol)
Sure, go buy it, but it's obviously void now.
Paying money on purpose for a piece of scrap paper — what a whim.
Kind of kills my urge to buy one.
Right? This genuinely pisses me off.
It basically means there's zero chance of ever winning.
The Special Investigation Squad should charge them with fraud.
Apparently it's about 1,000 tickets, so for around ¥500,000 you could win ¥1 billion.
The moment you travel to the past, the timeline shifts massively — you might land in a world where lotteries don't even exist lol
Okay, say you go back and manage to buy up every remaining ticket.
Would you actually get to hold that ¥1 billion, though?
It's only once the results are announced that you'd finally discover the dark side of the lottery.
In that case, the winning ticket just wouldn't come out of that shop at all.
The winner would come from unsold tickets at some other shop instead.
My condolences.
Never won for real and eventually gave up — the best I ever got back in one go was two ¥10,000 tickets, a pretty pathetic result.
Also, maybe because it was a while back, but a clerk once tried to pretend one of my ¥10,000 winning tickets didn't exist. When I called them out on it, they gave this overly theatrical apology and handed over the cash.
These days customers can at least see that checking-machine display, though.
Not lottery related, but you sometimes see footage circulating of pachinko cash-exchange booths skimming bills.
Doubling something that never wins anyway doesn't mean much.
Completely unrelated.
Each individual ticket's odds are an independent trial.
Don't expect regular people to keep the sales up — go pull a "jibaku eigyou" move instead (forcing staff to buy stock themselves to hit sales quotas).
With ¥500 you could get a bowl of ramen at Hidakaya, after all.
That's why you should be buying Loto 6 or Loto 7 instead of a regular lottery ticket.
"Shipbuilder Taro" (the poster's own nickname for himself) always keeps his antenna tuned to that kind of exciting stuff going on in the world.
Unsold tickets are treated as if they never existed, so that money doesn't go to the national treasury.
Maybe they really are manipulating the unsold numbers into winners after all.
There's no upside to bragging about winning on social media.
Because if you say you won, your life could be in danger.
Exactly. Even on the anonymous lottery board, you never hear that kind of story.
I keep telling myself "I'll be the first!" and getting fired up, but my turn never seems to come.
Background and key points of this discussion
Lottery winning numbers are printed on the tickets in advance, and the drawing itself selects numbers without regard to whether they actually sold. Because of this system, it’s possible — if statistically unlikely — for high-value winning numbers to stay unsold all the way to the end, and this case, where the first-prize preceding award hit but the ¥800 million first prize and ¥200 million following award went unsold, is an extension of that same mechanism. Prize money tied to unsold tickets isn’t paid to anyone; instead it’s folded into the lottery’s proceeds, which are funneled toward public works and similar funding. The thread split between those who saw deliberate manipulation by the drawing machine or the operators, and those who chalked it up to simple probability — the latter camp pointing out that “there must be huge numbers of unsold tickets every single time.” What’s easy for readers to misread is that this story isn’t “proof of fraud” — it’s simply a case of bad luck where the preceding, main, and following prizes didn’t all sell at the same shop.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Speed+) thread “[Summer Jumbo Premium] ¥1 billion in winning tickets become “worthless paper” after going unsold — lottery shop in Utsunomiya, Tochigi Prefecture“.
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