The discovery of two jackpot-winning lottery tickets from the same lottery retailer has raised eyebrows in South Korea.
Donghaeng Lottery’s March 1 draw yielded 16 jackpot-winning tickets, two of which were created by the same machine. The numbers on the tickets were allegedly selected at random by a machine in a modest, inconspicuous lottery shop in Siheung, Gyeonggi Province.
The odds of successfully selecting all six numbers in the South Korean Lottery are 8 million to one. The chances of it happening twice from the same machine for the same draw are more than 64 trillion to one.
Glitch or manipulation?
That makes it considerably more plausible that the double jackpot was the product of a fault in the machine’s random number generator – or something more sinister – rather than the lottery’s official line, which is that it was just a freak coincidence.
South Korea’s Ministry of Economy and Finance, which controls the national lottery, downplayed the possibility of manipulation.
The ministry stated that sales terminals at retail establishments are automatically removed from the server 35 minutes before the draw, rendering post-draw ticket issuing “impossible.”
Furthermore, if someone had discovered a way to game the system, why create two tickets when one would earn the same part of the prize pool without raising suspicions?
While 1 in 64 trillion sounds improbable, lotteries are organized on a regular basis across the world, with millions of tickets sold each time. Rare occurrences will occur somewhere over time and with numerous drawings.
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If it’s too good to be true, Conspiracy Theories appear
Nonetheless, conspiracy rumors are circulating on social media, encouraged by the fact that South Korean winners are seldom publicly acknowledged, as they are in other nations, notably the United States.
“The government must investigate and explain whether there was any computer manipulation to add first-prize winners after the numbers were drawn,” stated one viral post.
Social media users are clamoring for greater openness, requesting that the lottery provide the actual times and places of winning ticket transactions.
In 2024 in South Korea 63 Winners had split the jackpot
It’s not the first time South Koreans have questioned the South Korea Lottery credibility. In July 2024, an unprecedented 63 persons split the first prize, leading the ministry to conduct a “lottery day,” showing the system’s fairness to the public.
Donghang Lottery Executive Director Im Cho-soon argued that the seemingly impossible amount of prizes reflected tendencies in players’ favored number combinations. For example, many South Koreans prefer straight-line sequences on their tickets, he said.
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