'Total 6.5 Billion' Four Lotto First-Prize Tickets in One Place... Winner Presumed to Be the Same Person

1151st Lotto, Four First-Prize Winners in Osan

On the 21st, the results of the 1151st Lotto draw revealed that four manually selected winning tickets came from one sales outlet. If one person purchased all of them, the prize money would amount to approximately 6.5 billion KRW.

The winning numbers for the 1151st Lotto first prize were decided as '2·3·9·15·27·29'. The bonus number was '8'. There were 17 first prize winners who matched all six winning numbers, each receiving 1.6205 billion KRW.

An elderly person visiting a Lotto sales store is carefully coloring the number blanks with earnest hope. Photo by Mun Ho-nam munonam@

The first prize winners came from a total of 14 outlets: 8 automatic, 5 manual, and 1 semi-automatic. Notably, one sales outlet produced four manual first prize winners, drawing attention. That place is 'Oneul-ui Lotto' located in Osan, Gyeonggi-do. Since all four tickets were manually selected by the purchaser, it is presumed that they were bought by a single person.

A similar incident occurred in April. Five manually selected first prize winning tickets were sold at a convenience store in Suncheon, Jeollanam-do. At that time, the total prize money for the five winning tickets was 7.91906912 billion KRW.

In the 1057th Lotto draw held in March last year, 103 second prize winners were concentrated at a lottery sales outlet on Wangsanno in Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul. If the winners there were the same person, the prize money would have been approximately 710.27564 million KRW, nearly half of the first prize amount at that time. There were a total of 664 second prize winners in that draw. According to Donghaeng Lottery, the odds of winning the second prize are 1 in 1,357,510. Multiplying this by the total sales volume of the 1057th Lotto (112,523,887 tickets) typically results in about 82 second prize winners, but the actual number was about eight times higher than the expected average, causing the prize money to fall far below 10 million KRW.

As the unusually high number of second prize winners sparked manipulation allegations, the government explained that "manipulation is impossible."