"Lotto Lottery, Mass Winning Manipulation Impossible... Ticket Forgery Detectable"

The government recently requested a specialized research institution to investigate allegations of manipulation following multiple first and second prize wins in the Lotto lottery, and received a conclusion that manipulation is impossible. It was also determined that the recent multiple wins fall within a statistically probable range.

On the 13th, the Ministry of Economy and Finance’s Lottery Commission announced the results of verification requests made separately to the Korea Information and Communication Technology Association (TTA) and Seoul National University’s Statistical Research Institute to resolve recent Lotto manipulation suspicions.

The Information and Communication Technology Association, which conducted the verification, explained, "The current lottery system and drawing process have various measures in place to prevent forgery and tampering attempts from both internal and external sources, making manipulation impossible," and confirmed that "there are no risk factors that could undermine the reliability of the Lotto lottery."

Previously, in the 1057th Lotto draw held on March 4, there were 664 second prize winners, of which 103 tickets were all sold at a single store in Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul, sparking manipulation controversy.

Mismatch with Original Altered Ticket... Payment Denied

The association explained regarding whether an insider could manipulate the lottery system to change losing tickets into winning tickets to claim prize money: "Access to the server, network, and database (DB) is controlled so that only authorized users can access them, and all access logs and operations are recorded."

CBC-MAC is a technology that constructs a message authentication code (MAC) in a blockchain form, where the encrypted block depends on the encryption result of the previous block. In summary, even if someone illegally accesses the system and changes a losing ticket into a winning ticket, the altered ticket will not match the original at the CBC-MAC verification stage, resulting in payment refusal.

Even if a physical ticket is forged or altered, claiming the prize is practically impossible. The ticket authentication (k-secure) code printed on the ticket is generated as a unique random number and stored in the system as a hash value, so forged or altered tickets can be detected during the payment process. The association also stated regarding whether unauthorized external parties can illegally infiltrate the lottery system: "It is an independent network built with private IPs, each network is controlled by firewalls, and server access control solutions are used, so unauthorized access to the system is impossible."

Multiple First and Second Prize Wins Are Probabilistically Possible

The Statistical Research Institute of Seoul National University, which investigated the possibility of multiple wins from a probability and statistics perspective, stated, "The Lotto lottery draws are conducted randomly (equally), so the recent multiple first and second prize wins are sufficiently probable."

The institute conducted an equality verification of the draws using a total of 1,061 winning numbers from 2002 to 2023 and concluded from statistical tests that there is no evidence to reject the equality of the draws.

The verification method used by the institute was the Monte Carlo methodology, which approximates probability distributions using randomly drawn samples. Calculating the p-values of the test statistics under the null hypothesis (that the draws are fair) yielded values between 0.482 and 0.757, so the null hypothesis could not be rejected.

Additionally, analyzing 429 draws from the 631st (January 3, 2015) to the 1059th (March 18, 2023), focusing on number combinations purchased more than 20 times and purchase methods per draw (automatic/manual), the institute judged that the recently multiple winning number combinations fall within a probabilistically plausible range. The institute noted, "As the total purchase volume increases, the manual purchase volume, which accounts for about one-third of total purchases, has also increased, raising the likelihood of multiple wins." The institute added that overseas cases of multiple first prize winners include 4,082 people in the UK in 2016 and 433 people in the Philippines last year.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.