Did They Recover the First Prize Lottery Ticket Location? Donghaeng Lottery Says "Not True"

"Even After Collecting 200,000 Tickets, Winning Probability Remains Unchanged"

The lottery trustee, Donghaeng Lottery, stated that neither the lottery issuing agency nor the trustee knows the location of winning lottery tickets, regardless of the type of lottery, in relation to the recall of 200,000 instant lottery tickets due to a system error in 2021.

On the 24th, Donghaeng Lottery explained in a statement, "The distribution number and verification number of instant lottery tickets are stored separately in different systems, so the location of winning tickets cannot be known."

[Image source=Yonhap News]

Donghaeng Lottery emphasized, "While the location of a lottery ticket can be known through the distribution number, whether it is a winning ticket cannot be determined; conversely, the verification number can confirm whether it is a winning ticket, but cannot reveal the ticket's location. This is similar to the impossibility of matching 40 million names and phone numbers extracted separately from a phone directory after shuffling the order of phone numbers."

They added, "Regardless of the type of lottery, it is essential for the transparency and reliability of the lottery business that neither the issuing agency nor the trustee knows the location of winning tickets. No one, including the Lottery Commission and the trustee, knows whether there are any first or second prize winning tickets among the recalled tickets due to verification number errors. Therefore, reports claiming knowledge of the location of first prize tickets are not true."

Furthermore, they stated, "Just as the probability of winning and expected value do not change whether a lottery ticket is purchased early or late, even if 200,000 lottery tickets (0.5%) with randomness were recalled, the probability of winning and expected value do not change. Therefore, the claim that selling the remaining valid tickets after recalling erroneous tickets was a nationwide scam is not true."

Earlier, as of February, the first prize winner of the Spitto1000 58th instant lottery, whose 500 million won prize payment deadline had passed, did not appear, and about 200,000 tickets were recalled due to an error in the instant lottery on September 6, two years ago.

After no first prize winner appeared, suspicions arose that there might have been a first prize ticket among the initially recalled 200,000 tickets, and that the winning lottery sales points could have been identified through the data verification process.