"433 people won a lottery in the Philippines last weekend, and the whole country seems to be wondering," they mention the New York Times. "At what point does randomness start to look like fraud?"
Some Filipinos are accusing the state-owned company behind the nearly $4 million lottery of fraud. The company that conducted the lottery, of course, denied the accusation. 
But authorities said they planned to investigate the winning lottery to ensure the integrity of the market. How was it possible, skeptics ask, that 433 people could have picked the same winning combination of six numbers — 09-45-36-27-18-54? Or that all six numbers turned out to be multiples of nine?
Of course there are those who say that the result was a simple case of luck. Statisticians report that it was not mathematically impossible to achieve.
Some [critics] noted that some executives from the Philippine lottery office, which sold nearly $443 million in lottery tickets in the first half of this year, have already been convicted of bribery and other charges over the past decade. Lawmakers in both the House and Senate said this week they plan to investigate the controversial lottery. One of those lawmakers, Aquilino Pimentel III, the Senate Minority Leader, told The Times in a text message Wednesday that while the outcome was not "impossible," it seemed "highly unlikely...".
Professor Chua Tin Chiu, a statistician at the National University of Singapore, said the criticism was an example of people misunderstanding the nature of randomness.
"Not long ago, there was news about a person who hit the jackpot more than once in his life," he said. "Possible; Yes. Are the chances too small? Yes. Can it happen to anyone? Yes"
