Last Year's Unclaimed Lotto Prize of 41.3 Billion Won... Lottery Fund Reversion

[Asia Economy Reporter Seongpil Cho] Last year, unclaimed lottery winnings that reached the expiration of the statute of limitations amounted to 41.3 billion KRW.

According to data received on the 22nd by Kim Ju-young, a member of the National Assembly's Planning and Finance Committee from the Democratic Party of Korea, from the Ministry of Strategy and Finance's Lottery Commission, the lottery winnings that expired last year after being previously sold totaled 41.315 billion KRW. Lottery winnings must be claimed within one year from the payment start date; otherwise, they revert to the lottery fund. Last year, one first-prize winning ticket (2.379 billion KRW), 23 second-prize tickets (1.241 billion KRW), and 1,412 third-prize tickets (2.027 billion KRW) went unclaimed and expired.

The fourth and fifth prizes, which have fixed winnings of 50,000 KRW and 5,000 KRW respectively, had significantly more unclaimed cases. For the fourth prize, 120,662 tickets were unclaimed, resulting in 6.033 billion KRW reverting to the fund. The fifth prize had a staggering 5,926,944 unclaimed tickets. Although each ticket's prize is 5,000 KRW, the total amount reached 29.635 billion KRW.

Last year, the expired winnings for the pension lottery and printed lottery were 4.385 billion KRW and 3.543 billion KRW, respectively. The total amount of expired winnings from Lotto, pension lottery, printed lottery, and electronic lottery last year was 49.245 billion KRW, which is about 0.76% of last year's lottery sales.

The amount of unclaimed lottery winnings increased from 50.139 billion KRW in 2018 to 53.763 billion KRW in 2019 and 59.231 billion KRW in 2020, but decreased to 51.574 billion KRW in 2021 and declined again last year. When viewed as a percentage of sales, it has steadily decreased from 1.15% in 2018.