Car plate lotto text very phishy

Thousands of Beijingers waiting to win the lottery for one of the limited number of Beijing license plates received suspicious text messages over the weekend, sparking fears their personal information had been hacked.

After thousands of people posted about the messages online, the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau released a public warning that the message might be a phishing scam.

The plate lottery was put in place in December 2010 to combat the growing congestion on Beijing roads. About 1.2 million people vie for about 20,000 plates each month.

This has spawned a black market for license plates, leading to speculation by Web users that the text messages were part of some shady dealings.

Despite the public fears, a staff member surnamed Zhang from the administration office of the Beijing Municipal Commission of Transport, which manages the car plate lottery system, said that the questionable texts were just a service message. He said no fraudulent activity was involved.

"The text messages were from the system, but the system was neither being hacked nor the was privacy of people being leaked," he said. "People could only receive the verification code when they changed their password or during registration."

Many people who received the message had not changed their password or recently registered, something Zhang would not explain.

Most of the messages, sent on Saturday and Sunday, simply said "Verification code" followed by a six digit number and the words "Beijing car registration lottery office."

Some thought that they won the lottery after they receiving the message. Yet after logging into the online lottery system, their names did not appear on the winning lists.

A resident surnamed Bao said that he received the message on Sunday. "I thought that I finally got the plate after over a year," he said. When he logged into his account with his driver's license number on the online lottery system, he realized that he did not get the plate.

"I suspected that someone tried to log into my account to cancel my application," Bao said.

Zhu Lijia, the director of Public Administration Studies at the Chinese Academy of Governance, said that only by making the system transparent could the commission earn the trust of the public.

"One way to make it transparent is to put it on the television live," he said.

The head of the Beijing Traffic Management Bureau is under investigation after his son was found guilty of manipulating the lottery and selling plates for over 200,000 yuan each.