Alibaba, China’s e-commerce giant, has announced the suspension of online lotteries on its platform caipiao.taobao.com as the General Administration of Sport (GAS) issued a notice on Feb. 25 ordering provincial sports and welfare lottery administrators to crack down on illegal sales of online lotteries.
Alibaba said in a statement released to the Global Times that the suspension includes all kinds of lotteries that the company has partnered with, which became unavailable on the platform starting Feb. 28.
The company said that sold winning tickets can be redeemed; however, paid tickets for later rounds can be refunded only after one or five working days.
The Global Times also reported that the operation of other online platforms for similar lotteries have been put to halt. These include Tencent Holdings' 888.qq.com and Baidu Inc's caipiao.baidu.com.
According to the report, the two platforms will continue to run but mainly to provide lottery information.
On Jan. 15, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Civil Affairs and the GAS have called administrators to inspect and correct information in online lottery selling and submit them to provincial lottery administrators by March 19, Sunday. Since 2007, it was the fifth time that online lottery selling has been stopped.
The Global Times report said that the government is unlikely to lift the suspension orders, and online lottery selling platforms like caipiao.taobao.com may lose thousands of money from it.
A study by Beijing-based lottery market research firm Caitong Consulting revealed that China's online lottery sales last year reached 85 billion yuan ($13.59 billion), an increase 102.4 percent from the previous year's record.