International: Thief's 1000s of stolen lottery tickets nearly all losersA man arrested for stealing 4,400 lottery tickets suffered the double ignominy of winning only a trifling sum from the stolen stubs, Metropolitan Police Department officers said Tuesday.
Yoshihiko Akao, 31, a company employee from Gotenba, Shizuoka Prefecture, was arrested for robbery after he allegedly pilfered 4,400 unused lottery tickets from a sales outlet in Tokyo.
Instead of the billions of yen he dreamed of, however, the tickets Akao spent all night checking to see how much he'd won were largely duds paying out from 100 to 200 yen. He allegedly pocketed only about 80,000 yen in cash.
Akao admits to the allegations against him. "I did it because I wanted some money so I could play around," he told the police.
Officials from Mizuho Bank, which runs the lottery, had little sympathy for Akao."If you do something wrong, you're gonna get caught," a bank official said.
Police said Akao broke into a lottery ticket sales outlet in Chiyoda-ku in the early hours of Aug. 27 last year and stuffed 4,400 of the 200 yen tickets into a rucksack.
When the winning lottery numbers came out, Akao spent an entire night scouring a newspaper to match the numbers on the tickets he had, police said. However, the winners he did find only offered payouts of tiny sums.
Theoretically, his chances of picking up an enormous sum were good. Although there is a one in 5 million chance of getting the top prize of 100 million yen, there is a one in 1,000 chance of winning 10,000 yen, yet Akao did not even get any of these tickets in the 4,400 he stole, police said.
