By Tim Binnall
In something of a cautionary tale fit for Valentine's Day, a Chinese man who won the lottery two years ago and kept it a secret from his wife has been ordered to hand over a sizeable portion of the prize money to her after she discovered the ruse and promptly divorced him. The odd story reportedly began back in 2021 when the man, identified only by his surname Zhou, hit a $1.5 million jackpot. Rather than celebrate the incredibly lucky turn of events with his wife at the time, the lottery winner instead had a rather underhanded response to his good fortune.
Zhou proceeded to secretly stash a significant portion of the winnings in a bank account belonging to his sister and then spent a whopping $100,000 on a apartment for his previous wife. Over the next two years, the man was able to somehow keep his then-wife, identified by her surname Lin, in the dark about the lottery win. Zhou's proverbial house of cards eventually came tumbling down when she somehow found out about the hidden prize money and, in turn, filed for divorce.
At a court proceeding to settle the matter, Zhou was ordered to pay Lin approximately 66% of the money that he had hidden in his sister's bank account and spent on what is now his first ex-wife's apartment. Strangely enough, this is not the only instance of a lottery winner in China hiding the prize from their family as a man made headlines back in November when he collected a $30 million jackpot while wearing disguise so that his loved ones did not discover what had happened. One imagines that he may be having second thoughts about the scheme in light of how Zhou's divorce proceedings unfolded.